04.3
Asset data and its quality
Is the data the organisation makes decisions from of a quality anyone has determined, and does anyone know when it was last true?
What goes wrong without it
Asset data degrades continuously and silently. Nothing announces that a record has stopped matching reality, so confidence in a register tends to rise with its age while its accuracy falls. The second edition responded by separating data and information from documented information and requiring that attributes, quality and sources be determined rather than assumed.
What to examine
- Ask what data quality standard has been determined. The absence of one is now a nonconformity rather than a maturity observation.
- Check when each significant data set was last verified against the physical asset, and by whom.
- Establish whether data requirements were derived from the decisions the data supports, or from what the system happened to have fields for.
- Test alignment of terminology between financial and non-financial data, which the clause requires explicitly.
Required by
- ISO 55001:2024, Clause 7.6, data and information, revised in the second edition; ISO/TC 251’s guidance says the revision clarifies how data and information differ and makes the requirements clearer and more concise.
- ISO 55013, guidance on the management of asset data.
- ISO/TS 55010, alignment of financial and non-financial functions.
Read the sources
- ISO 55001:2024, asset management system requirements2024 edition; read 2026-09-26.ISO’s product page: the publication details and ISO’s own summary of the standard, not the requirement text. The contents, foreword and introduction cited in this publication are taken from the standard’s preview pages hosted on the ANSI webstore, not from this page.
In the asset lifecycle method
The steps of the two methods that this domain examines.