Predictive vs. Reactive: Modernizing Enterprise Asset Management with IBM Maximo

In this episode, the Triad team welcomes Gregory Ambrose from eCIFM and Traves Peterson from IBM to discuss IBM Maximo Application Suite. They explain how the combination of Maximo (the leading EAM tool) and TRIRIGA (the leading integrated workplace management system) now delivers a single, modern platform that manages everything from real estate and facilities to maintenance and capital projects. Greg and Traves highlight how this consolidation helps public sector organizations do more with less—optimizing aging infrastructure, improving transparency for constituents, and enabling predictive maintenance rather than reactive firefighting. They also address common concerns about complexity, emphasizing that implementation can start small with quick wins (like self-service requests or lease tracking) and expand over time. Finally, they explore how AI is being woven into Maximo—from occupancy sensing and AI-assisted lease abstraction to voice-to-text mobile tools that help field technicians work more efficiently. Their core message is clear: whether you’re a small municipality or a large state agency, Maximo offers flexible, scalable value—and the right conversation can help determine if it’s the right fit.

Doing More with Less: Optimizing Aging Assets:

“Organizations are having to work with less funding or less dollars to work with, so they’re oftentimes forced to either maintain or keep older equipment running… and need all that information about whether it’s a particular asset or a building to be able to make those choices… by having different technology in place, we can optimize the scheduling of maintenance… you can start to do maintenance when it’s required, or the assets basically giving you the information that says, hey, I need to be maintained now.”

The Remote Work Shift Has Changed Space Management Forever:

“When it comes to workspace, that’s drastically changed in the last 5 years, and being able to adapt and have now one solution that can address that is a big shift… Government agencies, typically, it’s seats and chairs in office. That is not necessarily the case anymore… remote work and everything like that, and addressing size, space management, possibly reconfiguring existing space through capital projects… can be done in one solution now.”

How Different Departments Build Data for Each Other:

“Real estate and lease doing their job of getting the lease in and understanding the square footage drives what the space team can do for where they put people… Understanding in that lease who’s responsible for what from a maintenance perspective drives those self-service requests, it can drive preventive maintenance, it can drive capital planning… You really get that level of detail by having all of these functional areas in one system, and building up that view of your portfolio is really, really important.”

Where You Come from Shapes What You See in Maximo:

“Where you come from, makes it how you view those other areas. Every time I’ve given a presentation to someone who is purely a maintenance person, they’re like, wow, I didn’t know it did all this. And vice versa, when you dig deep into maintenance for a space manager, like, wow, I thought it was just a work order. When in reality, it was all of these things that needed to align to get that work order from say, a request to getting the service done.”

From Point Solutions to Instant Insights: The Executive Advantage:

“Once you get this data in, what surprises those high-level executive-type people is it’s so valuable to have answers to these questions very, very quickly… they call the space person, they call the real estate team, and then the maintenance team, and a month later, they finally have all that data. Whereas today, they can go to a system… and have it almost immediately available. That’s a big change—immediate access to the data you need.”

Don’t Bite Off Everything: The Smart Way to Implement:

“You’re not doing everything all at once… Getting all that in discovery up front, laying out the framework that makes sense… We have been operating in the government space for 26 years… you don’t bite off everything. It’s a well-defined process: let’s load the portfolio information, then tackle what’s the first thing we want to do… laying it out all up front, and having those hard conversations with all the departments… real estate, you may have to wait third in line, but this is the best way to do it overall for your organization as a whole.”