Asset prioritisation strategy: A quantitative approach

When an organisation has many demands competing for limited asset management resources, it must allocate such resources in a way that will have the most impact on its core mission while minimising business continuity risk. Logically, resources should go to managing those assets that are most important to the strategy and operations of the organisation. In reality, however, most business continuity/risk/facility managers lack a disciplined, data-driven approach for setting management and investment priorities. The difficulty in attempting to align funding/management attention with higher priority assets is that the often qualitative concept of ‘important’ must be quantified. This paper will explain how to develop a quantitative measure — an asset priority index (API) — to score each asset in the portfolio to reflect criteria important to an organisation. It also describes how the API can be used as part of an overarching asset portfolio management strategy, and how business continuity/risk managers can involve senior management in asset management decisions. The authors will explore three basic questions: • How can API help organisations better manage their assets? • What is the process for involving upper management and stakeholders in creating an API? • How have other organisations successfully implemented the API framework?