Increasing budgetary constraints have raised the hiatus for allocation of funding and prioritisation of investments to ensure that long established and new assets are in the condition to provide uninterrupted services towards progressive economic and social activities. Whereas a key challenge remains how to allocate resources to adequately maintain infrastructure and equipment, however, both traditional and conventional practices indicate that decisions to refurbish, replace, renovate, or upgrade infrastructure and/or equipment tend to be based on negativistic perceptions of criticality from the viewpoint of risk. For instance, failure modes, failure effects, and criticality analyses is well established and continues to be applied to resolve reliability and safety requirements for infrastructure and equipment. Based on a bibliographic review, this paper discusses trends in meaning, techniques and usage of the term ‘criticality’ in the management of engineered assets that constitute the built environment. In advocating the value doctrine for asset management, the paper proposes a positivistic application of criticality towards prioritisation of decisions to invest in the maintenance of infrastructure and equipment.