A Brief History of Asset Management with Gavin Chadbourn

The new chair of our Community of Practice (Asset Management) Gavin Chadbourn has a history of working in the space where cutting edge research and industry development intersect. He shares his wisdoms from 30+ years in the sector.

Gavin Chadbourn makes a strong case for research and development in concrete asset management.

“Everybody expects clean water when they turn on the tap, they expect to be able to hit a switch and the lights to turn on. Without that, our way of life starts to fall apart,” Gavin said.

It’s the reason why asset management is one of our priority research streams and a sector on behalf of which we advocate for ongoing government investment.

Like Gavin, we care just a little bit about making sure our roads and sewers hold out.

An origin story

Gavin has been working in the maintenance and monitoring of concrete structures since before asset management was even a thing.

After getting a degree in civil engineering and working as an engineer for several years on heavy civil projects, he did his PhD in concrete materials.

His research was part of an industry-led and partly government funded project in the UK. According to Gavin, collaborations like these successfully transition innovations from researcher imaginations to real world applications.

“My supervisor was very clear that I needed to have blue sky thinking,” he said. “But I also worked with an industry partner that was looking at using metakaolin as a great cement replacement material.”

“So my research combined two parts—the research moving forward the knowledge base and the interlinked industry problem of using this waste product in concrete.”

The project was a success case with the industry partner commercialising the product.

After his PhD, Gavin went on to further research and construction roles. He supported clients managing their assets through maintenance contracts, inspections, deterioration predictions and repairs across rail, roads, ports and industrial plants.

“At the time this wasn’t referred to as asset management, it was more broadly just maintenance and operations,” he said.

“In the UK there was PAS 55, which was a specification around what you needed to do to better manage your infrastructure assets, and that’s where the term asset management started to become more widely understood.”

“Then that’s evolved into ISO 55,000, and there’s now a defined discipline.”

Since then, Gavin has worked on asset management across even more diverse sectors, from his core skills in transportation, to mining, oil and gas, buildings and entertainment…and most recently aquariums.

“How do you inspect and repair when you’ve got dugongs and sharks in the tanks? You can’t just put them in your bathtub. So I worked on lots of challenging projects, but had fun.”

What’s needed

For Gavin, asset management is about designing durable concrete structures and then implementing a monitoring and maintenance regime through its life to ensure it meets performance requirements and extends the life of the structure.

And in today’s world, industry is looking for innovations to solve problems such as ensuring bridges and roads can handle the increasing sizes of trucks, making structures resilient to extreme weather, and achieving net zero.

“The prescriptive nature of our specifications are holding us back. I want us to move to performance-based or outcome-based specifications.”

Gavin also sees lobbying policy makers and government as a way of making progress.

“Road authorities have a disproportionately large influence on the concrete industry,” Gavin said. “They produce a specification for their roads and bridges and those specifications tend to be used by local authorities as well.”

“And when you’ve got one part of an industry being very rigid on certain things, suppliers gear up to supply that. The trickle effect is that they can’t have equipment and mixes that supply this road authority and then totally different approaches for other things.”

Gavin sees the community of practice as part of a suite of mechanisms for change—especially in the precarious space of research, where outcomes may be hypothesised but remain unknown.

“Everybody likes to talk about a project when it goes great. But probably you learn most when a project doesn’t go as expected.”

Our community of practice will be sharing such stories, including one in the parallel stream of sustainable concrete about developing graphene admixture that didn’t lead to a commercialisable product but delivered invaluable learnings along the way.

“The sharing of ideas and thoughts and perspectives is really important to come up with the most appropriate solution moving forward,” Gavin said. “Even if you’re a specialist in a certain area, it’s always good to learn from other viewpoints.”

The future

Asset management involves a very holistic approach, so it isn’t surprising that Gavin has a big picture view of where concrete innovations are heading.

“If you look back at industrial revolutions, typically the changes have been around energy, which has often led to changes in transportation and communication modes,” he said.

“At the moment we’re seeing all of those three things happening at the same time, which is unusual because in the past the changes have taken place over decades.”

“So how do we, as asset managers, manage those issues but also leverage them for the benefit?”

According to Gavin, concrete structures rapidly need to accommodate new forms of renewable energy and electrification, and new forms of transport such as drones and autonomous vehicles.

“Moving freight, people and goods more efficiently will change how hard our road networks are used and therefore what they need to be.”

Gavin also sees another gamechanger shaping the industry.

“The biggest thing for me at the moment is the digitisation of assets. Real time monitoring to confirm how things are performing out in the field will enable those assets to be better managed.”

“You can be a lot more scientific around when you need to intervene to repair, strengthen or replace.”

“I could certainly see the digitisation of networks of assets, so not just one bridge and not just even a whole road network. It will be the interaction of the roads with other infrastructure and buildings and the connectivity of those things.”

“And then when you get to that volume of data, you’re going to need help sifting through and analysing it,” he added, alluding to artificial intelligence and the potential it offers for concrete asset management.

As far as history goes, this is it in the making.

Sign up below for our Community of Practice (Asset Management) – Intelligent monitoring of concrete corrosion in marine environments on April 15th. Or view the 2025 schedule.

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