Entrance attended the Oil Comm conference recently and one of the big topics of discussion surrounded how to manage data even as it proliferates more and more every day. During the keynote, “The Pursuit of the ‘Holy Grail’: Does it all come down to strategy,” J. Michael Kuykendall, Vice President, Global Information Technology, Apache Corporation put it this way: it’s all about “data, data and more data.”
And once you have this data, what do you do with it? Apache is still working on solutions to this problem, but Kuykendall stated that “more bandwidth isn’t the answer.”
In addition, high level executives don’t need to see the same things as lower level people out in the field. So one thing Apache has found helpful is becoming more selective about what data goes down to the field and what comes back. They then try to answer the question of what information will improve decision making for each audience, and what is just filler?
Based on this, Apache has begun to create dashboards that display this relevant information by audience. Turning off the firehose of information and getting specific is what Kuykendall sees as the way forward for bringing all of their rigs online and thereby gaining more control over what is happening out in the field.
As these rigs do come online, Kuykendall stated that the big payoff would stem from improvements in intellectual capital. Dashboards that cover data across every rig a company runs means that labor can be refocused on the fly, non-productive time can be avoided, and larger scale predications can be made.
In another session that day, Chuck Moseley, Business Development – SCADA, Inmarsat stated that, “we all crave more information because we know it’s there.” And once they find it, most executives know that accurate predictions and planning help create a company that is more profitable.
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