The document discusses several issues related to implementing condition-based maintenance (CBM) and prognostics and health management (PHM) programs, including: 1) Performing a thorough risk assessment using techniques like FMECA is important to understand how a system can fail and inform sensor placement and diagnostic rule development. 2) Model-based failure analysis considering failure dependencies is better than spreadsheet-based FMECA for knowledge retention and risk assessment. 3) Clear definitions of failure concepts and taxonomies are needed to improve understanding of risk assessments. 4) Diagnostic rules and sensor selection should be based on dependencies between failure modes revealed through risk assessments.