Learning from Social Media

Based on a study done by the University of Texas, if the average Fortune 1000 company increased the usability of data by just 10%, that company could increase their revenue by over $2 billion[1]. The same study suggested that collecting that data alone isn’t enough to increase competitive advantage. In fact the Data Warehousing Institute (DWI) estimates that bad data costs organization over 600 million USD per year.[2]

The ability to capture and cleanse large amounts of data has given oil and gas production companies access to massive amounts of data. This phenomenon called “big data” is not unique to the oil and gas industry; in fact online stores and social media companies like Facebook and Alibaba capture millions and even billions of data on a daily basis. Big data has the exciting potential to revolutionize the way we make decisions about every aspect of the production supply chain; if we can find practical ways to practical use it.

…can find practical ways to use [big data].

1) Learning from other industries

Companies that have best leveraged big data started by understanding what they wanted out of the data.

In summary having data for the sake of having data is expensive! The same study mentioned above goes on to show that if an average Fortune 1000 company increased data usability by just 10% it could benefit in a several ways including an increase in sales per employee by over 14% and a Return on Investment Capital – ROIC of over 19%. In the oil and gas (i.e. petroleum) industry potential gains are huge with a projected increase in Return on Equity- ROE of 200% (see figure 1 below). ¹

So what can oil and gas organizations learn from companies like Amazon that manage millions of back-end operations per day to generate more sales, or  Alibaba that handle more than 1 million customer transactions every hour?

In simple terms, does more data alone

1. Increase production
2. Minimize risk
3. Help us find more hydrocarbons?

In fact more companies are finding that the act of capturing the data alone is not a solution.  The real value will be in finding ways to use complex domain specific data.

2) Social Analytics for Oil and Gas

How can oil and gas companies benefit from the lessons learned in other industries that are effectively leveraging big data? 

In social media, social analytics measures awareness, engagement and reach to determine how efficiently information is communicated in digital social environments.  This enables companies to create strategies to improve communication and interaction among targeted social groups.  In multidisciplinary project settings, similar strategies can also be leveraged to ensure effective communication of key indicators including safety, best practices and other lessons learned.  The conversation- based approached, also called experience- based approach, of social media can also facilitate knowledge capture in complex global projects. This industrial social communication is maintained as corporate IP that can be searched and referenced for future projects.

… industrial social communication is maintained as corporate IP that can be searched and referenced for future projects.

Key questions:

• Does my platform include social analytics?
• Are these social tools relevant to my industry?
• Is this a new tool or is it integrated to my domain tools?

3) Decision Science for Oil and Gas

Decision science deals with everything from crowd sourcing ideas to find ways to use big data to improve the decision process. 

…internal crowd-sourcing

Using social media technology to enable internal crowd-sourcing allows teams to concurrently solve problems and find pockets of expertise while maintaining privacy and reusable corporate IP.  Capturing the problem solving conversation process can also be used to improve internal processes and training to mitigate risk and improve production practices.

4) Integrated domain reporting

Domain dashboards for engineering and simulation have been used to increase production and mitigate risk by offering a comprehensive discipline specific view without duplicating information.

Engineering dashboards offer users the ability to see project and business information in the context of the discipline team.  Teams can see project reports, simulation outputs and engineering deliverables in dashboard environments.  Such that, when the simulation team shares information with the design and project teams, each respective team sees the information in context of their respective needs.

Works Cited

1. Anitesh Barua, U. o., & Deepa Mani, I. S. (2010). Measuring the Business Impacts of Effective Data.
2. Eckerson, W. o. (2002). DATA WAREHOUSE INSTITUTE SURVEY ON DATA QUALITY. Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Information Quality (ICIQ-02).