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Black & Veatch: Management for All Stages of the Asset Life Cycle
Black & Veatch’s asset management services can help a utility decide when to rehabilitate or replace buried infrastructure.
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Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
16 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER
Will Williams: I started my career in 1990 in the United Kingdom after the privatization of the water industry. I joined the Water Research Center (WRC), which had been the government research center into anything to do with water and wastewater. Because the industry had been privatized, WRC became a research-based consultancy. It was a time of transition, as WRC went from being a government-subsidized research center to being more commercially focused. Because the industry was newly privatized, the new water companies were trying to understand the condition, performance, location, and age of all the assets they had. WRC started developing a lot of the principles that we now consider central to asset management, risk-based planning, and condition assessment. I spent 16 years at WRC and left as an executive director. I then went to another large international consultancy called Halcrow and set up an asset management practice there. This was a global practice with people in the Middle East, Australia, and North America. I moved over to grow the
PHOTO COURTESY OF LAURA BALCH.
lack & Veatch is a global construction and consultancy firm with more than 100 offices worldwide. One of its many services is its asset management practice, which works with clients in the water field, including municipalities, state governments, utilities, and research organizations. Black & Veatch’s asset management services for water agencies include strategy development and implementation, information solutions, and condition assessment. These services cover all stages of asset management, including planning, design, construction, operation, maintenance, and rehabilitation. In this interview, Will Williams, associate vice president of Black & Veatch’s water asset management practice, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about how the company helps its clients as well as the trends he sees in water utility asset management today.
