Digital transformation best practices for the oil and gas industry – Yogi Schulz

What best practices increase digital transformation success for oil and natural gas producers? This article explores best practices and recommendations that reduce risk and increase digital transformation success.

In the previous article, I described obstacles to digital transformation at oil and natural gas producers. You can read it at this link.

Incorporate these best practices into your project plan to increase the likelihood of digital transformation success.

Lessons from digital transformation successes and failures

1. Focus on the business opportunity, not the technology potential.
2. Listen to your end-users. Delight them with your improvements. Respond thoughtfully to their comments or challenges to your plan and prototypes.
3. Prioritize addressing people, process, and behavioural change. These topics are more important than cool technology.
4. Avoid endless pilot purgatory. Don’t just conduct pilot after pilot. Instead, propose projects that solve real problems where you can move your digital transformation solution into production.
5. Fail fast and learn fast. Don’t let others spin experimental failure as digital transformation failure. Set expectations that small failures will occur and form the basis for meaningful learning.
6. Approach work with agility. Be willing to revise your scope significantly as you learn.
7. Work directly for a project sponsor that sees an opportunity. Avoid working under a burdensome hierarchy.
8. Remind stakeholders that business transformation takes effort, whether digital or not.

Digital transformation projects are not slam-dunk, simple projects. Nonetheless, digital transformation projects produce valuable business improvements.

Conclusions

Digital transformation is receiving lots of attention because the benefits to the business are real and substantial. It’s not some fantasy that consultants have dreamt up to increase their billable hours.

Modest projects can achieve digital transformation success. You don’t have to launch high-cost, high-risk, bet-the-farm programs to gain value.

To identify opportunities at oil and natural gas producers, listen for whining about unproductive busy work. That’s frequently a digital transformation opportunity.

Recommendations

Take these actions to advance digital transformation at oil and natural gas producers:

1. Start – Show some initiative. Don’t wait for someone to tell you.
2. Start anywhere – It doesn’t matter where you start. Often financial reporting processes need improvement. Sometimes data loading processes for subsurface interpretation are tedious. Frequently field data gathering and reporting processes are clunky. Engineering document control can be onerous.
3. Start small – Improving administrative processes is where you can deliver some small, quick wins.
4. Identify some irritants – Where are inconsistent numbers on reports annoying management? Where is rework occurring due to bad data or convoluted processes?
5. Identify project sponsors – Identify a middle management sponsor for your improvement ideas. That person will provide support and communicate the results around the organization.
6. Assess risks – Nothing is without risks. Understand the people change your improvement will cause and address it.
7. Go easy on technology – New technology always adds risks to your project. Focus first on squeezing more value from the information technology you already own.
8. Build understanding – Read some of the vast numbers of available resources about digital transformation on the web to help you shape your project.

Yogi Schulz is an information technology consultant who works extensively in the petroleum industry to select and implement administrative, operations, and geotechnical systems. He writes regular articles about developments in the energy industry and technology.

You can contact Yogi Schulz through his LinkedIn profile at this link.

Share This:

---

More News Articles