Built on Collaboration

An article in Middle East technology publication ITP.net highlights an issue in the oil and gas industry that is proving costly, and yet has a tried and tested solution.

It reports that data storage provider EMC held an Energy Solutions Day in Abu Dhabi in June, during which IT management of oil and gas companies talked about managing growing information stores while minimizing downtime and enabling collaboration.

According to EMC, back-up and recovery of data is a key consideration for oil and gas companies due to the amount of information that is distributed around a number of sites or offices. Staff need to be able to store data securely and cost-effectively. They also need to be able to facilitate collaboration between knowledge workers in exploration and production, process safety, operations, and other areas.

To recap, the challenges are that the energy industry involves:

• Complex working structures involving dispersed, multi-disciplined parties
• The need for team members, across several functions, to be able to access and share information in real-time, even from remote locations
• A requirement to maintain a comprehensive and secure archive of data
• A robust, scalable and cost-effective system for data management that includes disaster recovery

Sound familiar? These are exactly the same factors encountered in construction; and the construction industry has been using collaboration tools to overcome them for much of the past decade.

More specifically, the challenges highlighted above all point towards the need for the energy sector to adopt web-based collaboration tools that are delivered using the SaaS model.

Although the resources and energy sectors are progressive users of IT, they are a few years behind the construction industry in their uptake of online collaboration. The gap may be closing, though - we are beginning to see more engineer-led industries (such as mining, oil and gas) recognize the benefit of implementing these tools.

Labels: Global trends, Technology