A decision enhancement studio for water asset management

The prevalent non-revenue water (NRW) that is continuously causing losses for water companies across transitional countries has led to an innovative approach on how to solve this problem. Initial studies revealed that one of the major challenges faced by these water utilities is ineffective decision-making in water infrastructure asset management, particularly maintenance management. This has resulted into inherent issues like leakages in the pipe networks, aging infrastructure, and high levels of NRW.

This design science research study introduced a Decision Enhancement Studio for Water Asset Management as an environment of services packaged in technology suites and recipes. It can be used to focus and structure a team’s decision-making while reducing costs of communication and information access and minimizing distraction among teams working collaboratively towards a goal. Prescriptive knowledge in the DES-WAM was created through designing, instantiating and evaluating the DES-WAM among sector managers in three water utilities in Kenya and Uganda. Evaluation results revealed that the studio is useful given that it enhances decisions which lead to: reduction in NRW, leakage reduction, increased firefighting capability, lower response time, reduced property damage, reduced risk of contamination and more stabilized water pressure.

The DES-WAM provides a new theoretical and practical approach for water asset management that directly focuses on maintenance management and goes beyond technological support by providing guidelines on how stakeholders can work in collaboration to explore water asset management decisions.