Special Interest Group: Oil and Gas

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  • 1.  Neale Stidolph's report on the conference

    Posted 05-26-2016 03:30

    Hi Neale and Dennie,

     

    thanks for the good overview on the conference in New Orleans. I got actually hungry when all the good food was mentionedJ

     

    This is not the point why I am writing; I actually have a question. Neale you stated there was a statement that a company cannot control centrally all their systems and applications.

    I would be interested how is Shell's view on this?
    I remember that our Data security officer was a little bit nervous when the initiative" BYOD" came on. How are we going to keep our data and knowledge secure?

     

    Thanks

     

    Kind regards

    Brigitte Kühn



  • 2.  RE: Neale Stidolph's report on the conference

    Posted 05-26-2016 08:16

    Brigitte,

    Every organisation (incl. Shell) is realizing that we're moving away from central systems that you can protect. For instance, we can use mobile devices or non-company-supplied computers as long as we use industry standard solutions to protect those devices and the connections to our networks. It does put more emphasis on creating awareness with our users on data protection and related topics, but our users are "adults" and we should trust them to use the tools. If we put too many obstacles in they way they do their work, they will find ways to do their work completely outside our control.

    Best regards

    Dennie




  • 3.  RE: Neale Stidolph's report on the conference

    Posted 05-27-2016 04:07

    Thanks for your note and good to see Dennie's view. My thoughts on this are that certain things must be absolutely controlled and then consider how controls can be relaxed the further you move out from that core. For example, most HR records, confidential information about reserves and exploration activity, industrial system data, many financial records all live in the core. In the next circle we may allow more diversity in tools that could read and analyse or interpret that information. Less critical information in outer circles could be left much more open to management and user discretion. New generations will have expectations that they can innovate and apply their own ways of working, so we don't want to lose that progressive and inventive streak with too much oppressive control. We could ask ourselves, how would we build a new oil company that would beat everyone else? What would its systems and information handling look like? If we don't think about that then someone else will and we could see new competition able to buy up assets at a reduced price. This is what scares other sectors such as finance, they don't worry so much about other banks but outsiders coming up with something radical. As John Mancini observed at the conference, four 'new' American corporations are equal in value to the entire GDP of Korea, $1.3Tn (Amazon, Apple, Google and FaceBook), and Uber is worth more than General Motors. So, are we going to fail to turn the tide or just go with it and surf, helping transform our businesses?

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    Neale Stidolph
    Business Development & Strategy Manager
    Sword Group
    [City] [State]
    United Kingdom
    +44 7801 039623