DOI Asset Management Vision

1. Introduction

The Department of the Interior (DOI) conserves and manages the Nation’s natural resources and cultural heritage for the benefit and enjoyment of the American people, provides scientific and other information about natural resources and natural hazards to address societal challenges and create opportunities for the American people, and honors the Nation’s trust responsibilities or special commitments to American Indians, Alaska Natives, and affiliated island communities to help them prosper.

DOI’s mission is enabled through its diverse portfolio of assets managed by bureau and office asset managers who strive to deliver these mission critical assets in a fiscally responsible way.  This Asset Management Vision establishes four Department Guiding Principles and five Department Imperatives to unify asset management efforts to cost effectively deliver assets that support the DOI mission.

Background

The United States Department of the Interior maintains thousands of diverse assets, including roads, bridges, buildings, and water management structures.  At the end of FY 2023, the Department's real property portfolio was valued at $400 billion with a significant deferred maintenance and repair (DM&R) backlog.  In essence, deferred maintenance is the cost of any maintenance or repair that was not accomplished when it should have been or was scheduled to be done.  When maintenance is deferred, it can negatively impact the condition of an asset which can lead to degradation of the asset’s performance. Additionally, deferred maintenance actions can lead to failures across other asset systems leading to higher corrective action costs over the asset’s lifecycle. 

Purpose

The purpose of this document is to codify the strategic approach to asset management for the Department of the Interior.  This vision establishes a desired end state for DOI asset management and informs the Department’s Asset Management Strategy.  The DOI Asset Management Strategy (ends) will shape Department policy (ways) and support the Department’s budget development (means).

The Department of the Interior will endeavor to reduce infrastructure costs to sustainable levels while continuing to support current and future Interior missions. Additionally, the Department will integrate asset resiliency, to adapt to climate change, and sustainability into its Asset Management Strategy.  The Department’s asset management community will lead this effort to balance and optimize the operations, management, and divestiture of its diverse asset portfolio.  This effort requires long-term leadership commitment and a collaborative effort across the Department to identify and adopt innovative approaches to reduce operations and maintenance costs, increase asset resilience, sustainability, and asset utilization (e.g. space utilization, optimize infrastructure footprint, and maximize efficiency) in delivering asset management services. 

The Department’s bureaus and offices support widely diverse missions with an equally diverse portfolio of assets located in every state and U.S. territory.  The Department’s asset managers will acknowledge these differences, but focus on what they have in common such as:

• The need to reduce operations and maintenance costs by adopting an investment strategy that favors lifecycle maintenance

• The need to incorporate resilience and sustainability into facility planning, design, construction, and operations and maintenance

• The need to improve asset data and performance measures to inform investment decisions and accurately identify portfolio requirements

• The need to collectively address human capital challenges involving recruitment, training, retention of facility and infrastructure maintenance and operations personnel

Lifecycle Investments

The Department’s asset managers desire to focus maintenance investments at the lowest lifecycle cost.  This investment occurs mainly in the form of proactive maintenance of components and major systems, including lifecycle replacements, to sustain an asset in good condition. This investment point represents the “lowest lifecycle investment” for an individual asset and when aggregated, a portfolio of assets.

Cost Effective Modernization

The Department’s asset managers will seek innovative ways to adopt new technologies into the construction and management of its assets.  This approach includes cost effective modernization at the right lifecycle investment for asset, system, and component replacement.  Cost effective modernization occurs throughout the asset’s lifecycle.  As components and systems reach the end of their lifecycle, they will be replaced with modern, more efficient components that leverage the latest technology. Additionally, when assets reach the end of their useful life, and can no longer be sustained at or below the cost of an in-kind replacement or mission changes dictate assets be replace or newly constructed, Department asset managers will ensure these modernization activities deliver assets with a lower total cost of ownership than the assets they replace.

2. DOI Asset Management End States

1) Rightsized, resilient, and sustainable asset portfolio, delivered at the lowest lifecycle cost, to enable DOI missions

2) A defensible, requirement-based budget strategy to support bureaus and inform external stakeholders

3) Relevant, comprehensive policy structures to support a common DOI asset management framework

4) Strategic and enterprise governance to continuously ensure asset portfolios and investment methodologies are optimized through alignment with strategy and lifecycle management processes

5) Rightsized, agile workforce that provides the competencies, skills, and abilities to meet current and future asset management challenges

3. DOI Guiding Principles

1) Focus asset investment dollars on the right long-term investment.  Emphasize lowest lifecycle investment, cost effective modernization, resilience to climate change, and sustainability opportunities to support our highest priority assets.

2) Make every asset investment dollar go further through adoption of best practices across the Department.  Foster an environment of innovation and collaboration to reduce the costs of operating and maintaining our assets, improve asset resilience, and enhance sustainability through employment of best practices, innovation, and policy.

3) Make better-informed asset investment decisions.  Develop and implement data-informed investment methodologies, performance targets and dashboards to aid leadership with making investment decisions, understanding trade-offs, and managing risk based on analysis of associated costs and long-term impacts.

4) Promote nondiscrimination in federal programs that affect human health and the environment.  The Department will manage its asset management programs, policies, and activities that substantially affect human health or the environment, in a manner that ensures that these activities do not have the effect of excluding persons (including populations) from participation in, denying persons (including populations) the benefits of, or subjecting persons (including populations) to discrimination because of their race, color, or national origin.

4. DOI Asset Management Imperatives

1) Budget - Develop an integrated Department funding strategy to defend an increase in the infrastructure O&M budget to 2% (until refined) of CRV to stabilize funding and enable lowest lifecycle investments. 

2) Communications - Leverage the Great American Outdoors Act as a complementary funding resource to restoring poor conditioned assets to good condition while focusing O&M appropriations on recurring maintenance activities.

3) Common Asset Management Framework - Implement a scalable ISO-55000 derived asset management framework to promote a common understanding amongst asset management practitioners, leadership, stakeholders, mission partners, and to serve as a foundation for a common policy structure.

4) Common Asset Management Enablers - Align data management, Information Technology, Human Capital, strategic planning, and policy development efforts across the Department’s asset management community. 

5) Embrace Comprehensive Approach to Asset Management - Integrate Human Capital management as an integral, cohesive component of Department asset management.

5. Strategic Alignment

The Department will implement its strategy for asset management through four phases. 

Phase 1 will focus on the collaborative development of a cohesive asset management strategy aligned to each DOI Asset Management imperative.

Phase 2 will focus on the collaborative development of Department asset management policy to implement the asset management strategy.

Phase 3 will focus on developing a data and IT approach supporting common performance metrics, and the standardization of data required to measure the effectiveness of the asset management strategy.

Phase 4 will focus on identifying and developing an actionable human capital plan for the asset management community.

6. Way Ahead

When adopted and properly resourced, this asset management strategy will reverse the trend of growing backlog, address human capital challenges, and improve data and IT management across the Department.  Additionally, it will provide a defensible, repeatable, transparent, and consistent strategic message to our external stakeholders for the Department’s approach to asset management.  Finally, it will bolster budget justifications by demonstrating the Department’s commitment to delivering assets at the lowest lifecycle cost through investment and portfolio rightsizing.

We will accomplish these efforts as a team. We will leverage existing forums for collaboration, discussion, and stakeholder engagement.  The asset management functional community will coalesce around common desired end states, challenges, and the activities which unite us and work together to identify, assess, and implement innovative management practices to achieve the activities outlines in this Department vision.