In some ways the oil and gas industry always has been ahead of the curve when it comes to compute power – geophysicists, for instance, developed algorithms years ago that are just now being used because computers finally have caught up.

In other ways, however, the industry seems hopelessly mired in some time warp while other industries are much more nimble in adopting new technology. Take data management, for instance. Data management “solutions” have been around as long as computers have, yet many companies still struggle to get a handle on where their data are and how best to access them. Add to that the fact that a data management system that worked well five years ago now is obsolete, and a fairly severe problem begins to rear its ugly head.

Ipad showing G20 content

A website created for the G20 summit allowed participants to communicate through a website that felt like social networking but was completely secure. (Images courtesy of OpenText)

OpenText is helping other companies catch up to the latest developments in computing, including social networking and computing in the cloud. Tom Jenkins, executive chairman and chief strategy officer for Open-Text, discussed the challenges facing the industry today.

The Generation Gap

When Jenkins recently was in Houston to meet with energy companies and showcase his products, the CIOs of these companies discussed some of the issues they faced with the younger people in their organizations, a group that Jenkins refers to as “digital natives.” “Our reality is that Facebook is now used more than Google,” he said. “Google was the old way of us going to the computer to get information. With Facebook, we go to another human being to get the information.” In the author’s note to his new book, Managing Content in the Cloud, Jenkins writes about the explosion of social networking and why it has been so successful. “These applications became so widely used because they allowed people to find information, collaborate, and communicate faster than they could using other services or similar portal sites. The rise of the Internet as a connected network has allowed human beings to connect and generate ‘virtual’ human intelligence on a mass scale.” With a growing workforce that relies on Facebook for much of its information, it seems somewhat ironic that all of the companies represented at the meeting block its use by their employees. But when information resides outside the firewall, problems can occur. In one example, an airline discovered that its proprietary information was showing up on YouTube. Typically when a part is changed, the airline needs approval from the Federal Aviation Agency or other governing bodies and then has to translate that information into dozens of languages to be included in manuals all over the world. Employees instead had videotaped the actual changing out of the part. “It’s language-invariant,” Jenkins said. “It’s monkey see, monkey do. The problem is that the corporation didn’t have an internal method for distributing the information, so the proprietary information was starting to pop up outside the firewall. It’s because people were getting frustrated.”

That frustration is driving the need for companies to create their own internal social networking. OpenText’s solution is to create internal versions of Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc., so younger workers can obtain information in ways that are comfortable to them without breaching company security in the process.

“Why would corporations not do this?” he asked. “The corporation that does versus the one that doesn’t is going to be way ahead.”

Embracing The Cloud

The profusion of digital devices – cell phones, BlackBerrys, iPhones, iPads, etc. – has had a profound effect on the way business gets done, Jenkins said. “In the old world, we were PC- and data-driven,” he said. “Now we’re mobile, and we have remote control of the desktop and remote servers. The cloud has really expanded the flexibility of what we can do.”

flowchart

Semantic content is analyzed, annotated, and related.

Jenkins showed an example of a “command and control” center in a major US city. Information from a multitude of sources – national news, weather maps, traffic updates, etc. – was constantly being updated on a single screen, what Jenkins called a “video mashup.”

“It allows you to take all of these inputs of information, both internal and external, and get a view of what’s going on,” he said. “That’s something that for the oil patch is absolutely essential. It doesn’t exist today. But it should.”

With incidents like the Macondo disaster fresh in the industry’s mind, it is clear that this type of integrated, streaming data system potentially could avert future catastrophes. “The sooner you can react effectively, the less it costs,” he said.

In fact, much of what Jenkins preaches is the need for accountability. He said this type of solution is particularly useful in industries that are information-intensive and heavily regulated. He showed an example of a page that had been created for the G20 meeting in South Korea. The website was much like a Facebook page, but it was totally secure. Users could form communities, post blogs, play videos, and chat. But the website also offered full records management and archiving and would, Jenkins said, meet the test of any government regulatory body. And it was accessible and instantly changeable from a variety of digital devices.

That mobility is something the oil industry can take advantage of. “The amazingly transformative thing is your ability to manage information, share it, and act on it,” he said. “We’ve never had anything like this before. This is so beyond a cell phone now.”

Productivity Gains

All of these new ideas are intended to improve productivity. Decisions can be made more quickly, and records of these decisions are captured to maintain the audit trail. “This stuff gives people a fighting chance to be both digitally interactive and protected,” he said.

Currently the oil and gas industry is in the process of finding, storing, and integrating its data. The next step in the process will be what Jenkins calls “semantic navigation.” This is a form of artificial intelligence or neural networking where heuristic algorithms “teach” the system to recognize patterns and aggregate content appropriately. This is taking place today on some websites. Jenkins gave an example of a newspaper website on which the main story would change based on the reader’s history. “They’re serving up information they know is more relevant to you,” he said. “They want you to stay on their site longer.”

No companies in oil and gas are using this concept in an organization-wide sense, although certain seismic processing techniques do employ the neural network concept. Jenkins sees the semantic navigation as being “the next natural step.”

Ultimately, semantic navigation will enable corporations to learn from past mistakes and achieve greater productivity gains. It also will serve as a “corporate memory.”

“The digital natives think differently than we do,” Jenkins said. “A lot of the discussion was about how to build social networks, private-label Facebooks and YouTubes and Wikis, so that the younger users can start to learn from the previous generation without taxing them.

“It’s a huge dilemma for the industry because, on the one hand, the lessons of the past keep that corporation out of trouble, but if they don’t embrace the new techniques and technologies, they will fall behind in productivity. You have to build an effective compromise between the two worlds. It’s like a football team – you need rookies, and you need the veterans. The coach has to coach for both. If you don’t have that combination, you’re going to lose.”