The trouble with our industry at the moment is the plethora of conferences and events that go on. The FT reported on Thursday that our industry is 40% less productive than the rest of the economy, is there a connection?
Last week there were, at least, four separate events happening in Europe. I didn’t manage to attend the Future Oil and Gas conference in Aberdeen, but it seems that I may have missed a rather good one. I’ve been asking around and receiving reports on the discussions and topics.
My informal word-count revealed some key themes: Open platforms, leverage of diverse data sets, generating insight (whatever that really means), data silos, collaboration, machine learning and AI.
Where are all the young people?
First the bad news. This conference seemed to have a definite bias towards the fourth industrial revolution and the future of innovative technology – but no-one arrived by skateboard. In fact, my sources indicate there were more suits and ties on display than at a moss-bros Christmas party and Grecian 2000 narrowly avoided being the main sponsor.
Where are all the young people?
When I go to a tech conference in the South East or in Silicon Valley I’m positively jumping out of the way of hover boards, unicycles and tattoo artists. I may appear flippant but I’m not – the great creative and innovative minds of the future seem to be missing from our conferences. If we are going to succeed we need to be able to form teams that embrace diversity and create energy. We need people like this and we need to provide an appealing set of challenges to keep them motivated.
Equinor supports entrepreneurs
Now onto the good stuff. Einar Landre from Equinor (the artist formally known as Statoil) told how they supported small vendors – while being careful to explain that they were not offering blank cheques, he recognised that procurement processes could be slow and risked pushing suppliers to the wall. I heard they claim to be actively promoting ways to engage with innovation and to create disruptive business models where they pay for outcomes rather than for inputs. Separately, I picked up on an announcement that Equinor plan to release all the operational data that was gathered on the Volve field to be used to test algorithms and find new ways of working. Well done chaps, I think that’s a very collaborative and welcome move.
Chrysaor integrates a new asset
I also hear that David Edem from Chrysaor gave a lively presentation where he told the gathering about the recent experience of taking over an oil field from another operator. How explained that first problem is to get hold of the data to understand what it is that you’ve actually bought. In the middle of all this their organisation head count grew 20x in a year and, for them, it is clear just how much time and effort had to be invested searching for data. David told us he was keen to address this early in the company’s life and highlighted one case where a simple change in data-handling practice is already producing savings of $1M pa. He said that we should consider carefully the value that is embedded in the data that comes with a platform and treat this as a capital asset.
Ithaca understands the tension between IT and OT
I also heard that Malcolm Brown from Ithaca was keen to share his experience regarding the tension between IT and OT. He brought a key insight that the perception of risk is different – IT believe that the more you leave a system alone the more vulnerable it becomes (because of the evolving security threats and the lack of patching), whereas OT believe the opposite – each time you touch a system it is more likely to break than get better (i.e. don’t fix what ain’t broke).
Of course, both viewpoints are valid and have merit. Reconciling these is going to be important for us all, so it sounds like formal risk-management processes with OT are going to be required to enable safe innovation.
Fail Fast and Learn
Another theme that emerged from the conference was Agile development of systems and processes. This is important, because Silicon valley has proven that Agile methods can increase the rate of value creation. They also establish competitive advantage and lead to unimagined breakthroughs. How can we integrate the “fail – fast & cheap – and learn” methodologies with our industry and still keep everything safe.
Keith Wildridge from Eigen brought this topic into his talk and was keen to share experience engaging in collaborative development with ENI making safety systems and using methods such as SCRUM and SPRINTS.
Event Format
The format for the event – that of discussions and panel sessions – was warmly received by everyone I talked to. They all said they were fed-up of boring people with boring powerpoints standing up and lecturing at an equally bored audience. This was much better. They were also happy that the representations were not all from Vendors trying to find a way to dress-up a blatent sales pitch as some form of case study. Exploring broad themes in an open environment went down really well – so this conference seemed like a welcome boost and I think it will stand the test of time and become a feature in my diary for 2019.
Conclusion
I’ll leave it to the words of Esa Jokionen from Rolls Royce who apparently summed up the industry approach to AI and Big Data. I’m told he said it was like teenage sex. Everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, everyone wants to say they are doing it – but, truth be told, there is not much of it actually going on, no one knows how to do it properly but everyone’s keen to try.
Image credit: http://www.futureoilgas.com