Asset health and condition monitoring: How to establish a successful program

The trend is clear; data collection is now ubiquitous and pervasive. Data is being collected on just about every imaginable variable that can be measured, from the rise of sea level to the number of times you have operated your dishwasher in the last twelve months. Data is so easy to gather that there are websites that allow users to connect a device to the website and upload live data. The website then allows users to graph and track the measurements. As one example, these types of websites were used by Japanese citizens to setup a network of radiation measuring devices within days of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, allowing people to track the spread of the radiation cloud live, as things happened.