Trevor,
Always so good to hear from colleagues with a similar passion about current IM issues facing both practitioners and engineers in todays world!
Indeed, I attended the first meeting of the new OGA IM Forum yesterday in Aberdeen with senior representation from across the industry including operators, EPCs, and service cos. All the same issues (and solutions) you describe were discussed with lots of nodding heads and violent agreement! What should avoid this being a talking shop is the 'authority' with which the OGA is granted and also the recognition that this Forum formally exists to support and enable a number of other 'boards' within the OGA.
So this is the (UK) oil and industry starting to agree how to work together going forward, and should some of the outcomes include a 'collect once' approach perhaps via a single archive, single vendor catalogue, national data repository and so on with the use of some industry standards & specifications - then there is a chance that things will change - and may even be mandated in some cases!
However, the real opportunity at this point is to be bold with the vision for information management - and to paint an exciting picture of the future based on new technologies and capabilities.
I sincerely hope we can rise to the challenge and look forward to keeping you posted.
Thanks again for your interest.
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Katie Izat
Information & Data Community Lead
Shell UK Ltd
Original Message:
Sent: 05-19-2016 23:34
From: Trevor Matthes
Subject: Katie's excellent IM presentation - How to introduce change
Firstly I really enjoyed Katie's presentation and it is great to hear that IM is seen as one of the 7 enabling pillars of OGA. I look forward to hearing more about that progress. Having spent many years in the UK sector I sincerely hope it can come out of this downturn competitive and viable.
I am particularly interested in CFIHOS because of my past involvement in Shell and more recently, the work done in Australia. It is a really positive step forward and is fantastic that the major Owner/Operators are beginning to embrace it. However another opportunity of CFIHOS is to challenge other established way of working. By that I mean moving to a model that allows the concept of collecting information only once. Let me explain which will lead to my questions to the community.
We as an industry are incredibly wasteful in that for each Capital Project we collect much of the same information we have collected before. A simple example is make/model information for generic piece of equipment [O' ring, cable tray etc, etc]. And not only for each project, but for each equipment Purchase Order per project. So that is an incredible amount of duplicated information we have to maintain for the life of an asset. Depends who's numbers you use, but the duplication can run into many millions of documents. A rough calculation [and I'd take a challenge on this] to collect, classify, approve and manage a single document costs $ thousands during the lifecycle of a capital project [think vendor effort, Engineering, IM/DC, storage etc] and maybe even more over the 40year life of the asset.
My question is how to make change and my experience has been that the change needs to come from the consumers of that information and not just us as the IM practitioners who are "only" the custodians.
- So how to convince a Engineer that if we already have the information, the Engineer need not ask the Vendor to provide it again.
- How to modify systems/processes to make this step change and be more holistic in their architecture [multi-asset, region and who knows, even company].
- How to move information consumers from a more document centric view to a more data centric view.
I am not an expert of other industries but I believe other industries are far more advanced in the concept of "collect once, use many" and I'd love to hear from any one that has that experience.
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Trevor Matthes
Chevron [Australia] PTY Ltd
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