The successful management of the oil and gas industry's vast data and knowledge resources is a topic receiving a lot of fanfare lately-and for good reason.
Recent consolidations within the industry, among other drivers, have inundated oil and gas firms with massive amounts of data, both seismic and financial. Companies, once merged, are faced with decisions about how best to organize and link their data together.
In addition, it has been widely projected that within the next 10-15 years much of industry's maturing workers will leave the workforce, taking with them the day-to-day operational knowledge and skills that are the backbone of any company's sustainable growth.
Inevitably, just how well companies grapple with-and implement strategies for-these and other issues surrounding data and knowledge management will serve to separate those poised for success from those simply struggling to get by.
Amassed data
Over the last few years, industry has been making giant strides in managing its data. The acquisition of data-particularly geotechnical data-is expensive, after all. And costs to manage these data are high as well.
To help maximize efficiencies while keeping costs to a minimum, operating companies have employed the assistance of service companies to maintain and manage their data. Effectively, oil and gas operators have increasingly become one step removed from the work that goes on in the field. This level of trust between operator and service company, however, took some time to develop.
"Ten to 15 years ago, you couldn't have gotten any of the major oil companies to part with any of the data," said Scott Shemwell, Oracle Corp. energy sector vice-president. However, once companies realized that they owned a particular lease and needed the expertise to optimize the performance of any given oil or gas field, they eventually warmed up to the idea, he said.
"Sharing data is, culturally, not the issue that it was," he added.
Over and above sharing data, the feat of moving massive amounts of information securely across a medium-such as the internet-has been another daunting challenge for operating companies. This obstacle has been lessened, however, through increases in bandwidth capacity and with more-secure internet connections.
"Right now, there is no reason for an organization not to be able to put a robust, secure, data-handling capability in place, because the technology is there to do it and the people are there who know how to implement it," Shemwell insisted.
Oil's labor's lost
No easy answers have surfaced re- garding industry's impending loss of its aging workers, who, once gone, will take with them vital industry knowledge. The personnel dilemma has many concerned.
To help bridge the personnel gap, Shemwell reckons that collaborative efforts between operating and service companies are likely to continue taking hold. Because operating companies, service companies, and other suppliers have carved out core competencies in their respective areas of expertise, collaborative ventures would continue to evolve quickly and easily, he explained.
"Operators have a different knowledge set, and that is really based around the management of revenue-producing assets," Shemwell said. "You can have all the data you want, but if you don't have the knowledgeable organization to interpret it-and obtain competitive advantage from it-then it's not worth very much, if anything."
Unocal project
Electronic-procurement ventures offer another spin on doing more work with less human capital.
Currently, Unocal Corp. is in the process of fully implementing an electronic-procurement initiative based on Oracle's collaboration technology, Shemwell explained. The initiative is designed to remove the 'e' from e-procurement, he said.
Referring to Unocal, Shemwell said, "They no longer want to have a procurement process and an e-procurement process. They just want to have the electronic relationship with their suppliers become the one way they do procurement."
Unocal will use the exchange for those things that are truly commodities but the company will continue to build off the strategic relationships that it has with the smaller number of suppliers, he added.
It's just one example of how companies are evolving in response to the huge challenge of managing data and knowledge with a declining, aging workforce. OGJ's special report focusing on this topic begins on p. 74.
