Year-End Review: Advancing Reliability Leadership and the Uptime® Elements Body of Knowledge

Conferences: From Events to Platforms for Change

The Reliability Conference

The Reliability Conference continued its role as an executive-level forum focused on leadership, culture, and systems thinking. Rather than chasing novelty, the program emphasized hard lessons from the field—what actually works when organizations move beyond reactive maintenance toward disciplined reliability and asset management practices.

The strength of the conference remains its audience: senior reliability leaders willing to confront organizational friction, not just technical gaps. The conversations were candid, practical, and increasingly aligned around common failure modes—poor work management, weak governance, and leadership behaviors that undermine long-term performance.

This conference is now less about inspiration and more about alignment.

MaximoWorld

MaximoWorld reinforced its position as the industry’s most practitioner-focused IBM Maximo conference. The emphasis shifted from system features to outcomes—how organizations are actually using EAM as a backbone for asset management, planning, and execution discipline.

Case studies demonstrated a growing maturity: better asset hierarchies, tighter work management integration, new APM/RCM capabilities, and more realistic expectations of analytics and AI. The tone was pragmatic, not aspirational. That matters.

MaximoWorld increasingly serves as the connective tissue between digital systems and operational reality.

The International Maintenance Conference

The 39th International Maintenance Conference (IMC) remained the broadest and most diverse gathering of maintenance and reliability professionals. What stood out this year was the depth of peer-to-peer learning. The most impactful sessions were not polished presentations, but shared experiences—what failed, why it failed, and what changed afterward.

IMC continues to play a critical role in developing the next generation of reliability leaders. It is where early-career professionals see the full arc of the discipline and understand that reliability is not a toolset—it is a way of thinking. In 2026 we will celebrate the 40th edition of this gathering and it will be the biggest and best yet.

CRL® Training: Maturity Over Mechanics

Certified Reliability Leader (CRL) training continued to evolve away from methodology instruction and toward leadership development. Participants consistently reported that the most valuable outcomes were not technical frameworks, but clarity—clarity about roles, priorities, and where organizations unintentionally sabotage reliability.

This year reinforced a core truth:

Reliability fails more often from leadership indecision and organizational design than from lack of tools.

CRL remains effective because it teaches leaders how to think, not what to install.

Reliability Leadership Community of Practice: Quietly Becoming the Core

The Reliability Leadership Community of Practice matured significantly this year. Its value is not in volume, but in continuity. Members engage in ongoing dialogue around real problems—budget pressure, skills shortages, digital fatigue, and cultural resistance.

What makes this community effective is trust. Conversations go beyond surface-level success stories and into uncomfortable territory: misaligned incentives, weak accountability, and the consequences of short-term financial thinking.

This community is increasingly where reliability leadership is practiced, not performed.

Uptime Academy: Learning That Respects the Practitioner

The Uptime Academy learning management system progressed from a content library to a structured learning environment. The emphasis this year was coherence—organizing learning paths so professionals can build capability progressively rather than consuming isolated modules.

The Academy now better reflects how adults actually learn: in context, over time, and tied to real work, career planning, and valued employee retention. This positions it as a long-term capability platform rather than a training repository.

The next phase will focus on deeper integration with leadership development and field application.

Publishing Reorganization: Revitalizing the Body of Knowledge

This year included a decisive reorganization of Publishing to refocus on its core mission: preserving, strengthening, and expanding the Uptime Elements body of knowledge.

Key shifts included:

• Re-centering publishing around human-curated, practitioner-validated content

• Improving discoverability and contextual support for existing materials

• Expanding supporting information to help readers apply concepts, not just understand them

• Reasserting publishing as the foundation beneath conferences, training, and digital platforms—not an afterthought

The goal is not more content. The goal is better stewardship of the world’s most complete reliability and asset management body of knowledge.

Closing Perspective

This year was not about growth for growth’s sake. It was about strengthening the infrastructure that supports reliability leadership over decades, not quarters.

Conferences became more focused.

Training became more mature.

Communities became more honest.

Learning systems became more intentional.

Publishing returned to its rightful role as the backbone.

That is how disciplines endure.

And that is how reliability leadership advances.