Digital technologies are unlocking a wave of new business improvements across the entire oil and gas industry. It has facilitated several oil and gas companies in enduring harsh market conditions. Digital technologies in oil and gas focuses on two aspects:
IT Optimization: Digitalization helps in creating a lean and agile IT service environment that focuses on Mode 1 operational excellence. New IT technologies such as advanced analytics, data center automation, DevOps, and cloud are explored and exploited.
Business Optimization: Digitalization helps in enhancing business performance by implementing digital capabilities such as business simulation, integrated planning, and asset performance management.
How digital technologies in oil and gas industry enhance operational excellence
- It amplifies business optimization by creating seamless integration across organizational silos, thereby helping in enabling operational agility at high levels.
- It can drive substantial enhancements for worker productivity, and fact-based decision making, thereby accelerating a creative digital innovation.
- It helps in promoting operational excellence by transforming the federated legacy operating environment into a lean, agile and high-velocity business platform.
- Digital technologies can also facilitate combining data from financial, transactional, geophysical and other systems. Thus, businesses are in a position to unleash business value by means of new forms of advanced analytics.
- Digital technologies can range from simple visualizations systems to complex simulation models that can reliably predict future performance, all the way to highly automated machine learning analytics.
Capturing value from digital technologies requires a fundamental shift in strategy and businesses must focus on following aspects:
1. Shared Standards
The confluence of digital technology requires a common set of standards that meet stringent operational requirements, thereby allowing for information sharing across the organization
2. Collaboration and Cross Training
For enabling seamless integration of digital technologies requires multidisciplinary domain knowledge between information technology, data management, process design and cyber security.
3. Self-Funding Projects and Change Management
Organizations must identify prime candidates to deploy digital technology that drives organizational momentum and alleviates resistance to new technologies
4. Security and Compliance
As assets are getting increasingly connected to the network, it is critical that businesses focus on protecting digital infrastructure against cyber attacks. This can be done by monitoring threats, building robust controls identifying vulnerabilities, and promoting a culture of security awareness.
Thus, implementation of digital technologies can facilitate operational excellence, thereby allowing oil and gas leaders to effectively prove that they are running their assets safely, sustainably, reliably, and cost-effectively.