The new ISO 19650 gets the ambition right, but the hard part is still missing

The standard now describes what organisations should do across the lifecycle. It does not address the dominant condition most organisations actually face: estates where structured information was never established in the first place, or was established during construction and has since been lost or degraded.

This is not a niche problem. The vast majority of the UK’s operational built environment was not delivered under structured information management processes. Even where it was, the information rarely survives the transition to operation in a usable, governed form. For estates that predate structured delivery entirely, there is no information to manage. There is information to find, assess, recover and structure before management can begin.

The standard acknowledges this. Part 2, Clause 5.2.3 includes “the acquisition of existing asset information” in its list of methods and procedures. Part 1, Clause 6.2 explicitly states that information management can start at any point during the lifecycle. But these are single items in a broader process description. The standard’s nine-step process handles the “create” condition well, where a project generates new information that flows through production, review, acceptance and aggregation into the asset information model.

It is less well developed for what I would call the “recover” condition, where the primary objective is to acquire, recover, or reconstruct information from existing sources. When you start from an existing estate, you face conflicting information across sources with no authoritative version, information of unknown provenance, assets that have never been documented, and a circular dependency: you need to define your information requirements to assess what you have, but you need to understand what you have before you can define realistic requirements.

The project-triggered model does not map cleanly to this work. This matters, because the recover condition is the dominant condition. Without detailed guidance on how to apply the standard in this context, there is a real risk that the standard’s expanded ambition remains aspirational for the very organisations that need it most.

Beyond the recover condition, there are two areas where the standard raises the bar without providing the practical support to reach it.

Progressive adoption: The standard describes the complete process: all nine steps, all activities, all roles. For organisations with no current structured information management, implementing the full process from day one is not realistic. Part 1, Section 4.2 acknowledges that information management can be implemented with different degrees of sophistication, and the proportionality principle in Clause 6.1 supports this. But the standard as a whole describes the end state, not the journey.

Guidance on maturity-based implementation, where organisations assess their current capability and define a progression path, would make the standard accessible to a much larger portion of the industry.

Outcome measurement: The information purposes framework is a real step forward. But it stops at defining why information is needed. It does not address how organisations should evaluate whether the information they manage is actually serving those purposes. The framework in Part 1, Table 1, maps perspectives to example purposes and example information requirements. An additional column, showing how the organisation would measure whether each requirement is delivering against the purpose, would close the loop between information management and value. Without it, information purposes risk being documented once and never revisited.

Organisations do not fail because they lack a standard to follow. They fail because they cannot bridge the gap between what the standard describes and where they actually are. They need a structured way to assess the current condition of their information. A methodology for recovering and structuring it progressively, building confidence over time. A way to connect information management to the decisions and outcomes it exists to support. And a maturity path that shows them the next step, not just the destination.

This is what I have come to think of as asset intelligence: the discipline that ensures the people responsible for buildings can find, trust, and act on the information they need to keep them safe, compliant and performing. It sits at the intersection of asset management and information management. Industry initiatives like the Information Management Initiative are working to raise the sector’s ambition across this intersection. But ambition at the sector level needs a corresponding discipline at the organisational level.

The new ISO 19650 describes the information management process. ISO 55001 describes the asset management system. Neither standard fully addresses the practical discipline required to connect them, particularly for existing estates that were never part of a structured delivery process.

Asset Intelligence is not a product category. It is a practice discipline. The new standard covers defining, capturing and governing information well. Delivering it into operational systems and exploiting it for decisions and outcomes sits above what the standard addresses. That is where practitioners need to focus. The standard creates the demand. Practitioners must fill the gap.

The new ISO 19650 raises the ambition to match what the industry needs. But a standard that describes the destination does not automatically create the capability to get there. The gap between the standard’s expanded scope and the industry’s ability to implement it is the challenge of the next decade. Frameworks like the IMI are raising the bar for the sector. The next step is equipping individual organisations with the practice discipline to clear it. That is a conversation worth having while the standard is still open for comment.

Glider has submitted formal comments to the BSI public consultation on ISO 19650. The public comment period for ISO/DIS 19650-1:2026 and ISO/DIS 19650-2:2026 closes 2 June 2026.

Nick Hutchinson is the founder and managing partner of Glider Technology, a UK-based company focused on asset intelligence and information management for the built environment.

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