To some engineers at oil and gas exploration and development company Nexen Inc., having access to information for reporting purposes means being able to think in terms of concrete data and not barrels of gas.

The Calgary-Alta.-based company wanted a master data management (MDM) strategy such that its engineers would have data delivered to them in a valuable format, and not waste time sourcing and dealing with potentially unreliable sources, said consultant Steve Dolha to an audience at the MDM Summit in Toronto last week.

"We found that most of the engineers were spending 50 to 80 per cent of their time sourcing, cleaning, confirming data, basically taking away from doing valuable engineering work," Dolha said, referring to specific analysis tasks they perform.

Some engineers at Nexen were losing faith in the available data pools, given the number of sources they had to weed through, said Dolha. As a result, they would create their own personal data sources they knew they could trust, further adding to the jungle of data silos.

Marc Smith, solution architect with SAS Institute Canada, said Nexen's data strategy is essentially a journey that started with removing uncertainty in their data to progressing to doing that on a consistent basis.