A suggested methodology for improving IAM by developing and monitoring the utility’s data quality capabilities

Great efforts have been put into developing analytical tools for assessing the condition and performance of water infrastructure assets over the past decades, and many of these tools have shown to be useful for planning purposes. However, experiences show that many utilities decline the implementation of analytical IAM tools, often due to insufficient data quality. In this paper it is argued that the implementation of IAM is also dependent on the data quality management capability of the utility, and that developing this capability is a prerequisite for predictive IAM. An array of factors, and the connections between these, have been identified and categorised. These factors have been put into the TRUST Roadmap methodology to form a suggested framework for planning a utility’s transition towards better data management capabilities. The result is a template plan for developing data quality. The concept of data quality indicators, for data quality capability monitoring in a utility, is also presented as a possible direction of future research.