Confronting the Legacy: Tackling Ageing Infrastructure
Responding to Mainstream’s 2025 Asset Management Report
Aligning Data, Decisions & Strategy
For nearly 30 years, the Mainstream research team has listened to the voices of asset, maintenance, and reliability leaders across Australia and New Zealand. Their 2025 State of Asset Management report confirms what many of us experience firsthand: while the fundamentals of asset management haven’t changed, the operating environment has grown more complex.
Organisations are grappling with ageing infrastructure, rapid technology change, decarbonisation imperatives, and workforce transitions – all while striving to maintain reliable, safe, and efficient operations. The challenge isn’t just technical. It’s strategic. Cultural. Organisational.
At Secora, we believe clarity beats complexity. That means reconnecting people, process, technology and data – not in isolation, but through convergence. Asset management should not be just a compliance function or a reactive activity. Done right, it enables long-term performance, financial resilience, and sustainability.
This five part series responds to the 10 key challenges raised in the Mainstream report. We begin with a foundational issue facing almost every asset-intensive organisation: ageing assets and legacy systems.
The Challenge: Legacy Infrastructure Under Pressure
Ageing infrastructure is no longer a future problem. It’s already here – visible in rising unplanned maintenance, safety risks, and mounting lifecycle costs. In sectors like mining, energy, utilities, rail, and defence, many critical assets are operating far beyond their intended design life. But because replacement budgets are constrained and planning is often reactive, these end-of-life assets remain in use by default rather than design.
At the same time, many organisations still rely on legacy platforms that can't integrate with modern systems. Critical information is trapped in silos, paper records, or disconnected databases, limiting visibility into asset condition and health. The result? Maintenance decisions are made in the dark, based on anecdote or urgency, rather than evidence.
Even where data exists, it's often inconsistent, inaccessible, or overly complex. Organisations may have dashboards – but not insight. Having data is one thing. Understanding what it’s telling you, and what you should do next, is another.
The Consequences: Escalating Costs, Deteriorating Confidence
The downstream effects of legacy systems and ageing assets compound quickly:
Unplanned maintenance becomes the norm, consuming budget and resources.
Downtime increases, impacting production, safety, and service delivery.
Missed replacement windows lead to asset failure, reputational risk, and emergency capital works.
Planning teams lack the clarity to build accurate forecasts or defend their recommendations to executives or boards.
Cross-functional misalignment grows – operational teams see one reality, while corporate or finance sees another.
In this environment, even well-intentioned strategies can falter. Organisations fall into survival mode, reacting to problems instead of preventing them.
Secora’s Response: Turning Data Into Decisions
At Secora, we’ve helped clients move from reactive to proactive asset management, without needing to replace all their systems or start from scratch.
We don’t start with technology or dashboards. We start with questions:
– What decisions do you need to make?
– What insight do you need to make them well?
The focus is to help take the asset based client from a state of information and data overwhelm, to developing the knowledge that there are many possible asset strategies, and equipping them with the wisdom to select the correct one.
1. Build Asset Health Metrics from Existing Data
We work with condition reports, maintenance logs, work orders, even spreadsheets – whatever data you already have – and however messy or partial it may be. Then we structure, score and simplify it into Asset Health Metrics: clear, repeatable indicators of risk, condition, and priority. This gives you a trustworthy baseline from which to act.
2. Create Phased, Fundable Asset Management Plans (AMPs)
We translate technical needs into investment-ready Asset Management Plans. Phased over time and aligned with funding cycles, these plans provide a clear, credible path for asset renewal, life extension or divestment – grounded in evidence.
3. Clean and Structure Asset History for Lifecycle Insight
Good decisions depend on good data. We help clients clean, validate and structure historical asset data to support lifecycle modelling, risk profiling and capital prioritisation. No new software required – just better clarity from what you already own.
The goal isn’t a dashboard, it’s a decision. Dashboards can help, but only if they can support clear next steps.
Why This Matters Now
As organisations face increasing pressure to modernise, decarbonise, and perform under scrutiny, the cost of inaction is rising. Ageing assets are not just an engineering challenge; they’re a strategic blind spot if left unmanaged. But when paired with the right insight and a practical plan, they can become the launchpad for resilience and renewal.
This challenge isn't solved by dashboards or software alone. It requires focused planning, cross-functional collaboration, and a clear line of sight from the asset to the boardroom. That’s where we come in.
Let’s Talk
If you’re navigating the challenges of ageing assets, data and information overload, or life extension planning, Secora can help. Let’s simplify the noise, uncover what your data is really telling you, and build a plan that moves you forward.