Smart Oil and the Development of the Networked Organization
Authors: Chapman Adrian , Forbes Peter 
Published: February 2015

Management

Over the last decade, the “intelligent oil field” has been the oil industry’s primary route to becoming smarter. The journey has developed from point technology solutions through collaborative operations to cross-asset optimization. The leaders in this field are transforming their organizations to become instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent.

Instrumented—the exact condition of things can be measured, sensed, and observed.

Interconnected—people, systems, and objects can communicate and interact with each other in new ways

Intelligent—changes can be responded to quickly and accurately, and better results can be achieved by predicting and optimizing future events

Smart oil is providing the opportunity for oil and gas companies to think and act in new ways, allowing them to enhance exploration and production, improve asset management, and optimize global operations.

Oil and gas companies have always gathered and managed data and expertise, but this information has largely remained siloed and static. Through extensive instrumentation and integration, a smart organization will aggregate all of these data, together with data from external sources, to achieve real-time visibility of its entire system. It will use these data to generate intelligent insights that will be shared within assets and functions, and throughout the organization, driving targeted actions to ensure efficient, safe, and environmentally sound operations.

Many oil and gas organizations began their efforts in collaboration by implementing local collaborative environments or centers with high-tech communications, visualization, and audio-enhanced monitoring or control rooms that enable more effective data collection, monitoring, communications, and knowledge and information sharing. These environments are designed to help resources make more informed decisions and to take the appropriate actions across the enterprise (Chapman et al. 2008). History has seen organizations implement local centers supporting one single operation, regional centers supporting multiple operations and in some cases global remote support centers (RSCs) supporting the entire organization (Roberts et al. 2009). The visibility and insight provided by smart oil will provide the opportunity to leverage skills across the entire organization, enabling the move away from collaborative environments, through a combination of collaborative environments and network, to realize the fully networked organization (Fig. 1). The fully net-worked organization will liberate staff from the constrained “point-to-point” communication that occurred in the past to the flexible “any-to-any” collaboration of the future. 

This move to a global networked organization will present challenges to today’s organizations, which often consist of a collection of autonomous business units linked to a central headquarters. Staff in autonomous asset-based teams will have to evolve to become a global team. The networked organization will require more collaboration across current function, asset, partner, and supplier boundaries.