Manager of Asset Systems at the City of Ryde, NSW, Anthony Ogle has a passion for overcoming language barriers – whether it be between nations, or between sectors.
How did you end up in your current role at the City of Ryde?
I’ve been in council for about 30 years, so it was more of an evolutionary process that saw me end up in asset management. A lot of it has been by necessity, because you can’t do things unless you have the money, and asset management is as much about securing funding from the council for programs of works as anything else.
What is the most rewarding part of your role?
Getting out there with other professionals in the industry, talking about asset management, sharing ideas, promoting what we do; that involvement in the industry.
You would have had plenty of opportunities for that at the recent IPWEA conference in Darwin, right?
The conference was really good for networking, catching up with people. Even just between sessions, at lunch and everything else, talking with a whole lot of other engineers from around the place.
What is the most challenging aspect of your work?
Trying to integrate asset management across the organisation. When you’re trying to deal with finances, and records, and people in community life and parks, with all of their information and putting it into the system, and trying to help them write asset management plans in the style and the structure that’s been adopted by the corporate side of things, that’s the challenge. It’s working with people across the whole spectrum of the organisation and trying to make it all fit within a truly integrated system.
You appeared in PWPro in 2012 when your council took on a French work experience student. Do you have an update on City of Ryde’s work experience program?
We’ve had a student over from the same French university twice now, and we’re hoping to do it again next year.
What I’m looking for out of the program is an opportunity to learn from the ideas and standards in France, and in Europe. They are so different to ours, but we’ve got no idea because we rarely go past the language barrier. So the idea of taking on the university students is an opportunity for us to crack the language barrier, to develop professional relationships in France and possibly more of Europe later on, to get past English-speaking countries and to look at how the Europeans are doing things. The French have a very difference approach to public works engineering and there are things we can learn from that.
City of Ryde also takes on three engineers every year through the ‘sandwich program’ at UTS.
My main concern with that program is that we give the students the appropriate experience and a taste for public works engineering. We want them to at least have a good understanding and appreciation of what it’s like to work in the public works sector, so they can make an informed decision about their career path later on.
What IPWEA tools do you use in your day-to-day work and find most valuable?
As an aside, with regards to the forums, I have to admit it is rather intriguing that the only people talking about the financial side of things are the auditors, while the engineers are talking about the engineering side, and there’s not really much robust discussion about the crossover or interaction of the two.
So you feel there should be more discussion between the two fields?
It’s not even necessarily a question of discussion, it’s like a language, if you’re going to communicate you need someone who speaks both languages and I think in some ways the auditors don’t speak the language of the ‘real world’, and engineers as a generalisation usually loathe worrying about the financial side of what they do.
Pictured: Anthony Ogle (left) with French work experience student Antoine Mayoux in late 2011.