Computerized maintenance management systems may not sound exciting (a 4-letter acronym!), but they are quite fascinating and diverse when you drill down into it. CMMS is a very broad, diverse area, so you first need to start with the question: what are we really maintaining? The maintenance of the equipment in a factory is quite different than the type of maintenance done in an office building. 

Infrastructure is Different

Unsurprisingly, governments have quite specific requirements for some of the assets they look after, from two perspectives. 

The built environment. 

Roads are quite different than office buildings or houses or factories, for many, many reasons! Most of them can be summarized by the fact that they tend to stretch out horizontally vs. built up vertically for most commercial buildings. Think of a regular office building: it's got a few floors, most quite same-y in terms of core layout. By contrast, a road can go on for hundreds of miles and cross over a very varied terrain, implying different rates of decay and associated maintenance.

The fixtures. 

Again, quite a few differences here: a local authority doing maintenance on a highway needs to know the precise geolocation of a hydrant, a stop sign or a pothole in a long stretch of road. Many of these fixtures are also exposed to the elements or need to be tended to while taking weather into account (a pothole can't so easily be fixed while it's raining!) - less the case for most items I see around my office right now...

Either way, infrastructure is an enormous area for asset tracking - one of the major construction segments regardless of country. It also sometimes includes other complications such as tracking "vertical-ish" assets like a water purification plant. No wonder special attention is paid to it from the software point of view. 

CMMS for Government: An Area of Significant Activity

Historically, governments tracked their assets with pen and paper, making decisions around where to deploy maintenance dollars / time on the fly. This is less the case nowadays though, given the need to leverage scarce resources across an ever expanding asset base. 

Most have moved towards a CMMS, with public sector-focused providers seeing solid double digit growth as a result. A couple of important trends are shaping this dynamic segment. 

A move to cloud. a special section on cloud news!

Some of the first movers into CMMS made the transition away from pen and paper in the 1990s, but these systems are now being replaced by modern, cloud versions. This is no different than most other sectors. As always, government tends to lag behind in cloud adoption, but the wave is coming - to that effect, Government Technology has

System standardization.case studies involves the city of Lincoln, Nebraska consolidating five software systems across nine functional areas of government onto one Beehive instance. They not only benefit from having just one database to manage assets and maintenance, but also realized a 50% saving on their fees across four years. This type of sophisticated cost-benefit analysis and system standardization is something we continue to see across government buyers (Workday in Denver is another adjacent example).

One of my favourite

Continued investment and M&A.acquire Yotta. Two months later, Cartegraph was acquired by OpenGov. Most recently in September, Beehive raised further capital, for a total of $12m so far. In all, investors are seeing opportunities here: weaving these systems together in an integrated package to leverage shared data, as well as helping entrepreneurs grow their CMMS businesses.

In May of this year, we saw Causeway