A recent survey has found that while oil and gas industry professionals may view certain social media tools—such as networking web sites, instant messaging, text messaging, wikis, blogs, and podcasts—as important for improving productivity and collaboration, few companies currently have tools in place to successfully benefit from these electronic tools’ potential efficiencies.
The survey, entitled Oil & Gas collaboration Survey 2009, was released jointly in mid-February by Accenture and Microsoft Corp. and was conducted by PennEnergy in partnership with the Oil & Gas Journal Research Center.
The survey found that while 40% of industry professionals polled thought that company adoption of new social media tools, including social networking web sites, would boost on-the-job productivity, only one in four of those surveyed reported actually leveraging these newer tools to capture and share vital information internally.
Old vs. new
Survey respondents included a worldwide pool of industry engineers, geoscientists, and business managers. The survey found that despite more than 70% of those polled believing that collaboration and knowledge-sharing were important for driving revenue, cutting costs, and contributing to the health and safety of workers, most respondents stated that their organizations are still using older means of collaboration, such as face-to-face meetings, e-mails, and conference calls.
“Perhaps more telling is that 61% of respondents said they spend at least 1 hr each working day searching for information and knowledge sources necessary for their jobs,” the survey reported. “With an estimated 65,000 engineering professionals in the global oil and gas industry today, this translates into a potential loss of almost 10 million people-hr/year among engineers alone, an average net annual loss of $485 million for the industry, calculated according to US Department of Labor salary statistics,” the survey said.
Craig Hodges, US energy and chemicals industry solutions director at Microsoft, noted, “During this time of economic upheaval, when every dollar counts and effective decision-making is crucial, new technologies such as social media tools can help oil and gas industry professionals find information, collaborate, and generally be more productive.” Hodges said, “In an environment with fewer workers and less resources, this is incremental productivity our industry can use in finding new reserves, improving execution of capital projects, driving new innovations, and reducing costs.”
Survey results
Finding ways to facilitate knowledge-sharing and capture topped the list of concerns among survey respodents. “Survey respondents confirmed that concerns about capturing knowledge from experienced workers before they retire or leave the company is prevalent,” the survey said.
Claire Markwardt, senior executive with Accenture’s energy practice, said, “Companies are dealing with several trends right now, not only the aging workforce walking out the door with decades of knowledge, but also experienced hires coming into their businesses who need to understand a new corporate culture.”
Markwardt added, “Companies have an opportunity to supplement their existing collaboration capabilities with newer tools such as podcasts and social networks to accelerate the sharing of knowledge, increase teaming, and augment communication between their workforces in different regions.”
Survey respondents stated that the tools primarily used to retain knowledge and intellectual capital from retiring workers are mainly older methods, including electronic file shares, 64%, databases or repositories, 58%, and written documents and physical files, 58%. “In fact,” the survey said, “almost a quarter of respondents reported exit interviews as the tool used most often to capture knowledge from these workers.”
Respondents overwhelmingly said new collaboration technologies can help stem the flow of exiting knowledge. When asked which of the social media tools would be most beneficial for this task, respondents said: internet portals, 81%; social networking web sites, 58%; video or photo sharing, 56%; blogs or mini-blogs, 44%; and wikis, 43%.
“While more than half the respondents favored adopting social media technologies to help shrink the productivity gap, only 37% of respondents think their companies are prepared or very prepared to facilitate enhanced sharing and capturing of the company’s intellectual capital,” the study said.
When asked why, 48% of the respondents said company management didn’t view these issues as a problem. “And 44% laid responsibility for lack of readiness on older workers who do not typically use digital knowledge-sharing capabilities,” the study said.
Full survey methodology and results are available at www.microsoft.com/oilandgas.
