ISO 24591-2:2024

Overview

ISO 24591-2:2024 - Smart water management: Part 2 Data management guidelines provides a foundation for treating data as a strategic asset in drinking water, wastewater and stormwater services, systems and facilities. The standard outlines principles and basic rules for efficient data acquisition, storage and processing, and addresses organizational aspects for managing large-scale water system data to improve operational efficiency, compliance and decision-making.

Key topics and technical requirements

• Data as an asset
  • Emphasizes data valuation, cataloguing and sharing to avoid duplication and maximize reuse.
  • Recommends defining data requirements (precision, timestep, freshness, retention) before collection.
• Data quality
  • Requires measurable data quality controls and validation (automatic or manual).
  • Advises consistency checks across time-series and related parameters and expert review where needed.
• Data management and governance
  • Calls for a top-level data strategy and governance model (roles, policies, monitoring).
  • Aligns data asset management with organizational strategy (references ISO 55001 concepts).
• Data value chain and basic rules (clause 5.4)
  • Covers ownership, security, privacy and confidentiality; acquisition; contextualization; referencing; standardization; normalization; and pre-processing (including validation).
  • Recommends pre-processing data close to the source (edge processing) to limit unnecessary flows and environmental impact.
• People and organization
  • Describes organizational roles and responsibilities to implement data governance and operationalize data practices.

Practical applications

• Improve operational efficiency of water networks through validated sensor and IoT data.
• Support asset management and predictive maintenance using normalized, high-quality datasets.
• Enhance regulatory compliance and reporting with auditable data governance and retention policies.
• Enable digital twins and analytics by providing standardized, contextualized datasets for modelling and AI applications.
• Reduce costs and environmental impact by avoiding unnecessary data collection and optimizing storage/transfer.

Who should use this standard

• Water system owners and operators
• Asset and operations managers
• IT, data and analytics teams in utilities
• Regulatory bodies and consultants working on smart water projects

Related standards

• ISO 24513 (vocabulary for drinking water/wastewater/stormwater services)
• ISO 55001 (asset management principles - referenced for data-as-asset alignment)
• ISO/IEC 38505-1 (data governance guidance)

Keywords: smart water management, data management, data governance, data quality, IoT, digital twin, water systems, data lifecycle, ISO 24591-2.