The Integrated Technology Solution (ITS)—A Program for the 21st Century
Authors: Nor Rosly Mohd 
Published: December 2007

In order to meet the challenge faced by PETRONAS Carigali's recent accelerated growth, an Integrated Technology Solution (ITS) was developed to optimise and stream-line key business elements of data, process, technology and people development. The Data Ownership and Management initiative emphasized on the project team members' ownership of the data as key corporate assets and set the proper policies and procedures for handling, storing and retrieval of data and information. The Process Optimisation initiative, delivered an optimised and collaborative road map for the project team to select the optimum route to produce the Field Development Plan (FDP), while defining standards for the deliverables, milestones for validation and peer reviews. The Technology Mastery initiative provided a framework for a structured and self-driven development of the project team members. This ITS program is a step forward towards a knowledge enabled learning organisation where skilled knowledge workers use readily available, clean and validated data and information, through optimised and collaborative processes that leverage on state-of-the-art technologies to increase hydrocarbon reserves and company profitability.

Introduction

In recent years PETRONAS Carigali Sdn Bhd (PCSB) experienced an accelerated growth that stretched its existing resources and challenged its Field Development Planning's business ingredients, namely the data, workflow processes, technology and people. At the dawn of the 21st century a new capability program was launched in PCSB to adopt a comprehensive approach to address the issues facing its Field Development Planning (FDP)'s key business ingredient in an integrated manner, as the spring board enabling PCSB to meet its current day challenges against a backdrop of rapid changes and leaps in technology advancements.

Data, processes and tools are inter-linked through people, the heart and soul of the organisation. That is why the Integrated Technology Solution (ITS) has people as its primary focus (Fig.1). By providing them with easily accessible data to work with, on-the-job training on existing tools and applications, and optimised workflow and processes that would help them function better as a team and be able to produce best in class results.

The focus during the first year of this fully in-house program are the Geoscience (Geology & Geophysics) and Petroleum Engineering (Formation Evaluation) skill group, the domain of the Petroleum Engineering Department of PCSB. This paper describes how the first phase of the program was implemented, the benefits obtained, the lessons learned and the plans for the future.

The initiative was developed, managed, and piloted by a joint PCSB-GeoQuest team, leveraging on and integrating existing PCSB internal expertise, tools, and capability within the domains of Information Technology, Data Management, Human Resource Development, Technology and Quality.

The initiative was officially launched on August 18, 1999.

Data ownership and management

Objective.

The data ownership and management initiative's objective is to design and implement the foundation of data and information management system that best fit the business requirements. It focused on building a solid foundation of clean, organised, validated data and making this data readily accessable to the team to work. This could only be achieved if the project teams take ownership of the data and treat it as the company 's most important asset.