Data Management Goals

"If there are a hundred organizations in an industry, they will have a million ways of doing the same thing": especially with respect to data management . Why is this so?

The simplest reason I can come up with is the fact that the oil and gas industry is very broad, and very deep (no pun intended!). Even if we were to restrict ourselves (and narrow the realm) to upstream and specifically exploration and production, there still exist numerous different activities, and hence various kinds of data.

To further complicate matters, these activities are not performed by agents of the same scale. Organization sizes typically range from one or two man operations to multi-billion dollar oil companies employing thousands of people. So, the data management solution that Exxon uses cannot be used by "Jed Clampett" (...from the Beverly Hillbillies http://www.forbes.com/lists/2005/fictional/07.html)
Note: Jed will frequently appear in my commentary and will represent the small and medium oil companies.

So, it is reasonable to assume that a single product, a "mother of all data management solutions" is not going to work for us. They will have to be numerous, highly-scalable sets of tools that will be required to get the job done. And in order to identify these tools, we need to first understand the job that needs to be done. What do we hope to achieve with E&P Data Management?

Overarching Goals of E&P Data Management
Let me begin by adding a few here, and as and when you guys send in comments, I will update this list (at my discretion - this is my blog! ;) )

1. Access: The primary reason any data should be organized and managed is to provide fast, reliable access. I should be able to find my data when I need it. This is fairly prevalent in the industry today. We have invested millions of dollars in proprietary databases with sophisticated search features. Also, we use tools like Google Desktop to search for files on our local hard drives. However, what I need is to be able to find all available data when I need it. This means, even data that I did not know about - data that resides on your hard drive...
2. Efficiency: E&P Data Management helps reduce redundancy - not just of data, but also the effort that goes into creating that data. This prevents people from having to re-digitize logs that were digitized (but not shared). So whether it was toys, when you were young, or logs when you are old - sharing is good!
3. Conservation: The goal of any successful endeavor always involves saving time and saving money. And a system that functions as a well-oiled machine will serve that exact purpose. Here are some interesting facts from Key Organization Systems (http://www.keyorganization.com/statistics_page1.asp)
   - The average U.S. executive wastes six weeks per year retrieving misplaced information on desks or in files.
   - Workgroups lose 15% of all documents they handle and spend 30% of their time trying to find lost documents. 7.5% of all documents get lost completely.

Can you think up of any other broad goals of E&P Data Management? If so, feel free to comment.

Next time, we will speak about the typical E&P Data Management workflow.

Standards Based Knowledge Environment

The PPDM (Public Petroleum Data Model) Association has an interesting article on Standards Based Knowledge Environments. This article was published in the journal "First Break" in January 2005 and offers sound insight into the need for open standards for the oil and gas industry.
From the article:
"...A knowledge-based environment differentiates information
that is important and useful as a working asset, such as
project data stores, from information that must survive and
remain accessible and usable for years or decades.
Understanding the work processes that create and use information
lets oil and gas companies plan their data stewardship
from cradle to grave. Storing important, long term asset
data in vendor neutral forms (such as XML files, tiff images
and PPDM Databases) helps ensure that key information is
not locked away when it’s needed...."

If you think about it, this move towards (open) standards is well understood in other data management arenas, the latest of which is spatial data management within GIS. So, in effect we could learn to avoid the mistakes made in other fields, such as adoption of competing, proprietary standards.
Then there are industries that decided to go all out and create and adopt standards that look awesome on paper and inPowerPointt, but are a pain to implement. So those standards just kinda die and people go back to doing things the "old way" .

Hello and welcome to the first of (hopefully) many musings about Data Management for the Oil Exploration and Production Industry. Lets face it! we have a lot of data (hundreds of years of well logs, seismic reports, well production data for areas all around the world) which is used by a lot of very sophesticated systems and software. And then we have numerous ways we manage this data - ranging from huge rooms with logs, maps and documents to large, enterprise-wide systems.
I am responsible for the design and development of one such system, here at Neuralog, Inc. And while we go about figuring out what the industry needs and wants, I thought it would be a good idea to share my thoughts and read your comments.
I have seen the development of systems that become so big and proprietary that they topple under their own weight. On the other hand, there are some that aim to be open ended and diverse, that they do not serve the purpose they were designed for.
As I go about discovering what exists in the industry, what looks cool, what aims too high, or too low, I will keep you guys updated with what I find.