Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/117518
Business Geographics Today, given that the gap between infrastructure investment demand and supply of funding is diverging rapidly, the competition for capital will intensify, resulting in money flowing to those projects backed by the best business case. These "best business cases" must wisely address the aforementioned issues for that infrastructure project to be considered worthy of the risk by private investment. Intersection of PPP and GIS When discussing private investment in public infrastructure, many think of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs): a contractual arrangement whereby the resources, risks and rewards of the public agency and private company are combined to provide greater efficiency, better access to capital and improved compliance with a range of government regulations. These contractual vehicles can span upwards of 50 years or more. In recent years, the lack of available government funds to meet demand has been a main reason for considering a PPP approach to infrastructure. PPPs get around the initial funding challenge, but, by their nature, they frontload costs, so they're not always the cheapest to initially implement. Because of this high implementation cost, it's important to ensure there are efficiency gains from the private-sector experience, including improved project delivery, access to advanced technology, and moreefficient operation and management capability, which can be used to offset the additional costs. In reviewing approaches that many countries have used, one trend has been the establishment of "value for money" as the main criteria in judging the merits of a particular PPP option for an infrastructure project. For the purposes of this discussion, PPPs are treated as a single approach. However, it should be noted that the term PPP represents a variety of financing models that vary by ownership of capital assets, responsibility for investment, assumption of risk and duration of contract. PPPs provide infrastructure services in the energy/ power, communication, transportation and water/ wastewater sectors that previously were delivered only by the public. Several reasons for this include the following: and management. the growing needs of investment. access to advanced technologies and processes that develop more rapidly in the private sector. Today, infrastructure projects require detailed and precise iterative planning and feasibility studies based on the most recent data typically collected from a variety of primary and secondary sources, and simultaneously applied against numerous outcome requirements. to social, economic and environmental true-lifecycle cost-benefit analysis. Results of the analysis, in turn, are used during planning and design to determine the investment-performance requirements that the project needs to meet to deliver the business case that satisfies private investment. Infrastructure is a system of systems, and that perspective needs to be kept when looking at a project over its life expectancy. It's this "future condition" requirement at a systems level that drives the analysis of the business investment and, at the same Geospatial data modeled, visualized, simulated and analyzed in BIM show the complexities of sub-grade utilities at a dense New York City site. 28 G E O 2 O 1 3 STANTEC and GIS data. can't predict future conditions of what's needed at a system level, and then model, simulate and visualize various alternatives of a particular project's design approach during planning to arrive at a single approach that will work for optimized lifecycle results and win private investment. This traditional shortcoming of handling "big data" limits transparency of project costs, construction timelines and associated performance, creating the perception of unpredictability and therefore risky investments. Moving to Wise Investments with the exponential explosion of GIS/geospatial and model-based data being generated, that doesn't mean