Special Interest Group: Oil and Gas

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  • 1.  Information Reservoir

    Posted 06-07-2016 02:36

    Dear Colleagues

    You may find this article I posted this month of interest. It also touches on the dilemma that many have discussed and debated over the years for information organization - folders or tags.

    Provocatively, based on the published literature, it is suggested Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS) part of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) have not delivered the expected benefits, with some practitioners suggesting (some) information and records management professionals such as ourselves may be part of the problem (as well as the solution?).

    Regards, Paul

    The Information Reservoir: Bimodal Information Management and Enterprise Search

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    The Information Reservoir: Bimodal Information Management and Enterprise Search
    Staying afloat under the deluge of information that is presented to us every day can be a challenge, before we even think of swimming in it. Work overload challenges both productivity and performance.
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    Paul Cleverley
    Robert Gordon University
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  • 2.  RE: Information Reservoir

    Posted 06-08-2016 20:12

    Paul,

    Thanks for the interesting points.

    You may not remember but we did discuss these kind of topics many years ago in Rijswijk. I was looking at Information portals for capital projects and I think, if I remember correctly, you had similar aspirations for the GIS area.

    I wholeheartedly agree that by using traditional EDMS folder structures we risk thinking one dimensionally in terms of how we present information. Slightly controversially I would suggest that our industry thinking is still narrow in this respect. At the birth of the EDMS, folders were great because it was an improvement on the alternatives, but today dare I say it could be seen as out of date thinking [and I say this as a folder advocate in the past]. Whilst I acknowledge the value of search tools, I am also not convinced they provide the complete answer simply due to the volumes of data we now collect.

    Maybe there is not a single silver bullet but blend of approaches can help. Visualisation is the one that interests me most. So simply by creating views of information with a graphical frontend that represents something the business understands - 3D plant model, business process map, GIS, functional map etc.

    One thing I did on a project in the early 00s was create HTML "views" of the EDMS to suit different business groups [Asset Development, Eng, Enviro etc]. This successfully changed the perception of the tool and increased its usage and ultimately user compliance/conformance. 

    This led me to be an advocate for using viewing alternatives such as Engineering portals and GIS front-ends that provide a visual key to information. I am always reminded of the very first time I saw that way back in the 90s. The small companies name escapes me but they had a visual ordnance map representation of oil fields in the Middle East and by hovering over a specific well, layered data was provided with headings such as Operational Procedures, GIS, permits - that type of thing but all configurable.

    if I was in the EDMS market I would be expanding my product in this area......

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    Trevor Matthes
    Chevron [Australia] PTY Ltd