1. Poor data management costs major oil & gas
producers up to 22% of their annual income
In 2012, Oracle released its report: ‘From Overload to Impact: An Industry Scorecard on Big
Data Business Challenges’. They interviewed 333 executives representing North American
firms, asking them to define the obstacles and difficulties they encounter in handling the
overflow of data within their organizations, and how well they are using that information to
drive profit and growth.
The industries covered by the survey were: airlines, communications, consumers’ goods,
financial services, healthcare, life science, manufacturing, public sector, retail, utilities, and
of course – oil and gas.
The results of the survey show that on average, the volume of data an organisation has to
‘digest’ increased by 86% in the last two years. Most of the companies find this situation
difficult to deal with – 60 % of the surveyed executives scored their organisations as having
significant gaps in human resources, processes and tools to cope with such an increase.
Almost all (97%) interviewed executives said that a change had to be made to improve the
situation.
Of all the surveyed managers, 93% believe they are losing revenue as a result of poor data
management. Organisations with the annual revenue of £1 billion or more declared they

2. lose about 13% of it as a result of inadequate data management. This can be translated into
$130 million in lost opportunity per annum!
For oil and gas sectors this loss is even more significant and can reach up to 22% of the
annual revenue! This is the most among all the surveyed industry sectors. This finding
confirms that the robust data management systems are crucial for the profitability and
market competitiveness of the oil and gas producers.
Most of the organizations (77%) see the opportunity for improvement in industry-specific
applications and software. The example of such solution for the oil and gas sector could be
information system designed to monitor oil reserves and distribution, helping to meet the
current demand.
Among all surveyed oil & gas managers, 74% admitted to use industry-specific software for
making strategic decisions, while project management (36%), regulatory compliance (32%)
and customer relationship management (26%) were identified as the key areas where there
is room for improvement.
The main problems identified within the sector are:
- Business managers cannot get access to the information they need- they have to rely on IT
department (32%)
- The organization does not have the right system in place (29%)
- The system in place is not designed to meet the industry specific needs (23%).
Most difficulties could be addressed through:
- Providing business managers with an access to the critical business information
- Improving training to help understand the data, and
- Improving tools so that they can collect more accurate information.
Update to 2015
Today our industry faces significant challenges, challenges not seen perhaps since the mid
1980’s oil price collapse. The key question is how to address the industry needs that solve
business problems and where are those needs, which sector needs support and where is the
industry willing to invest.
To me this seems relatively obvious, it’s not going to be frontier new exploration, it’s not
going to be managing data collected 25 years ago; it’s going to be “active” data, data that
impacts the performance of the “producing” business units. This is where data is critical; this
is where the expertise needs to focus. The new OGA in the UK appears to have a remit to
extend the life of UKCS, to achieve that the industry needs to address how they are
managing existing Fields, reservoirs and how to maximise their capacity to extract oil/gas
from these Fields at minimum cost.
PRM and 4D time lapse is one area where fast access to these data enables more effective
well planning and management and can predict to some extent the fluid changes that occur
within the reservoir and can implement timely actions to achieve an optimal recovery at the
lowest cost.

3. Cost is everything now, driving down costs, overcoming costly errors owing to poor data or
data not being available, is at the heart of where O&G data management can still deliver
valuable contributions to the industry.