Looking for inspiration

I like to look across sources for analogy and stimulating ideas. A couple of things have recently caught my eye.

I find it amazing how hard it is for people (including me) to see the implications of new technologies and ways of working. In retrospect, once a change has happened, it’s obvious what the outcome would have to be. But when the change is happening it’s not so clear.

Going up

Ground floor
Perfumery, stationary, and leather goods, wigs and haberdashery, kitchenware and food. Going up…

Can you remember the theme tune to Are You Being Served?

I’m old enough to remember the lift operators in Aberdeen’s E&M and Watt & Grant department stores. They were replaced by automated lifts in about 1980. The stores have both succumbed – one to the shopping mall, the other a victim to digital retail.

Being a lift operator was a skilled profession, making sure that you stopped the elevator car level with the floor and opening the concertina iron-work doors with the brass handles.  Apparently New York’s last lift operator was only made redundant in 2009 Link

The Economist 1843 magazine just ran a story making the connection between the elevator operators strike and the adoption of self-driving cars. We could probably do the same with roles in the oil field.

The elevator strikes in 1945-47 crippled the city, and led to calls to redesign the city so that only low-rise development was permitted – to reduce the power of unions.

Of course, the answer was – as we know – automated elevators. But a lot of change management was required before people started to use them. Innovations such as emergency stop buttons, telephones for help and recorded announcements all came about in this time.

I’ll wager that we will look back at some of the manual ways of operating an oilfield we use today in the same way was we look back at the anachronism of the elevator operator.

Electricity – who’d want that?

Another story that I picked up on and found illustrated a point was this one [Link]. It’s written by the BBC’s Tim Harford. He asked and answered the question why did it take so long for electricity to displace steam in the factories in the North of England. It was decades after the invention that it was fully adopted.

He explained that it required a redesign of factories before the economics made enough sense for people to abandon centrally powered manufacturing and move to individually powered machines. We’ll see the same adoption economics in oil field operations and technologies such as 3D printing.

Digital Marketing – a lesson for oil and gas?

Today I found another article that resonated. This one is from Marketing Week [Link]

Mark Ritson makes the case that the separation between Digital Marketing teams and Traditional Marketing is ridiculous. What I think he’s saying echoes my point that there should be no separation between “IT” and “The Business”, because IT needs to be just how things are done around here. It’s true in Marketing, it’s true in Oil and Gas too.

“… On the one hand you need to avoid being precious about your digital creds. Signal early you are entirely comfortable losing the D prefix from your title and, for good measure, add something re-assuring like ‘I do not even know what digital means anymore’ or ‘isn’t everything digital now?’.

The merger process means that anyone who is a member of the extreme digerati will be the victim of the new regime. You know the type: obsessed with AI, convinced in the long-term value of VR, boastful that they don’t own a TV. They will be the first to go when the revolution comes.

Digital experience is a prerequisite

But make no mistake, it’s no good proclaiming that digital is wank and it’s time to get back to basics, pull all the money from Facebook and get it back into ‘proper’ media. The post-digital era cuts both ways.

While idiot digerati will be exposed, so too will those who aren’t open to the potential of all the new research and media options that have appeared over the past decade. When Alastair Pegg, the leading marketer at Co-op Bank, noted that that there was “no such thing as digital marketing” he followed up with the corollary that “all marketing is digital marketing”.

I think I can see the parallels between what he’s saying is happening in Marketing now, and what will overtake the world of Oil and Gas operations in the next 3-5 years. What do you think?