This dissertation aims to help infrastructure organizations in developing countries better understand how they could improve their performance in managing infrastructure assets and services. Implementing formal asset management in these organizations is a promising solution, yet, there are currently no studies that incorporate developing countries’ perspectives to understand the potential barriers and important variables for asset management implementation. Additionally, there is no study that has explored the impacts of different asset management variables on organizational performance. To address these knowledge gaps, this dissertation addresses three primary research questions: 1) What are the potential barriers to establishing asset management organizations in developed and developing countries? What are the similarities and differences between these contexts? 2) What are the important variables of asset management that optimize an infrastructure organizations’ performance in developing countries? 3) How do the political/legal, economic, social, and technological environments of a country impact the sensitivity of strategy alternative options on organizational outcome measurements? In response to these questions, this research involves and depends on experienced professionals to provide the necessary knowledge to answer the research questions. In Chapter 2, through a survey of practitioners from both the USA and Libya, the research provides the potential barriers for asset management implementation process. These findings show the significant differences between the perspectives of developed and developing countries. With this basis of understanding, this research created an infrastructure asset management organizational model using Cross-Impact Analysis (CIA) and a General Performance Model (GPM) in particular. The model allows for qualitative data collection from practitioners. It also allows for running Monte Carlo simulations to analyze the interactions among different asset management variables and explore their impacts on the organizational performance. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 focus on the model descriptions and results. The findings in Chapter 3 show that all nine variables have an impact on performance, but four variables have the highest impact on organizational performance. Chapter 4 focuses on exploring the impact of the external environment on both the effectiveness of managers’ decisions and the organizational performance. The findings showed that there is significant impact from the conditional variables (external environment) on the organizational performance. Taken together, these findings contributed to asset management knowledge by considering organizational theory and looking at the implementation process through the lens of organizational change.
Beitelmal, W. (2016). "Towards an Infrastructure Asset Management Organizational Model for Developing Countries." Dissertation, University of Colorado Boulder.