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Defining Moments: SPE Digital Energy Conference, 2011

27.04.2011
Just last week, I had an opportunity to attend for the oil and gas industry. The conference took place in Woodlands, TX and drew good crowd including giants like BP, Chevron, Shell, as well as Baker Hughes, Haliburton, and many others. The conference ran almost a week that included keynotes from the industry speakers as well as technical sessions aimed at solving specific problems. It was good to see niche industry vendors as well as few IT vendors (Cisco Systems, Pegasystems, Covisint, Data Foundry, and etc.) displaying their solutions for the oil and gas organizations.

The conference came right in the middle of the . Although, Macondo incident was not the focal point of discussions at the conference; there was a general consensus that industry needs better technology and process to avoid this kind of incident. The attendees of the conference focused on defining digital oil and gas concept. Keynotes covered a variety of topic - IT usefulness in the digital oilfields, re-inventing business processes in the light of changing technology, innovating and making a digital oil and gas organization- to the most part it was a fresh reminder that IT is here to stay and changes it brings will revolutionize the industry.

The digital oilfield concept encompasses using information technology to improve speed to first oil, reduce non-productive time and enhance well production. For the digital concept to flourish, conference attendees agreed that they face three major inflection points:

* -- I was happy to see that speakers acknowledge a defining moment for the industry; that security needs attention. The event lacked an in-depth focus but there was adequate recognition. I strongly feel that this topic will garner more interest and should be a priority for oil and gas industry, especially, when protecting the intellectual property is a huge concern. Risk management is an established topic but the context here is security specific. Industry still needs to get abreast with this concept. Security breaches like Stuxnet and Night Dragon are enough to wake the audience and assert the importance of security.

* - It was refreshing to see that industry is cognizant about the cultural changes that social media technologies like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others are bringing. There were numerous inferences to the changing workforce that requires new ways to connect and share date. A digital oil and gas industry cannot sit at the sideline when its new workforce is more mobile and connected; hence it's cultivating a cultural change.

* -- A smarter and digitized oil and gas business relies on an integrated operations including, drilling at the rigs, to collecting information from the wells, and transmitting data to the operations folks and partners for analysis. There are numerous technologies that can bring efficiencies such as sensing technologies at the rigs, data transport tools, collaboration rooms, 3D visualization, data management & analytics, video conferencing, cloud computing, and so on.