IT Technical Section makes gains on digital education, integration

Since its inaugural meeting in November 2006, the IT Technical Section has set its sights on making information management more accessible to all oil and gas professionals. Section members, consisting of IT professionals from production and service companies, recently held their second board meeting in Houston, Texas, U.S.A. where they discussed current initiatives and future plans.

Mehrzad Mahdavi, Chairman of the IT Technical Section (ITTS) and Vice President of Global Security for Schlumberger, led the board meeting, which was held immediately after SPE's Digital Energy Conference.

He expressed optimism with the section's progress over the past several months. "In particular, I'm pleased with the progress made in launching the four subcommittees that were formed to identify and address specific IT implementation challenges."

The four subcommittees formed within the ITTS have been charged with advancing several initiatives, including cyber security, ontology and the creation of a new engineering/IT hybrid discipline. Members from each subcommittee were present to provide an update on their activities year to date.

New Discipline Subcommittee

"In my opinion," said Mahdavi, "the New Discipline Subcommittee provided one of the most important reports at the meeting." This subcommittee has been charged with investigating the creation of a new university curriculum discipline that combines IT and engineering, something that does not currently exist in most engineering programs serving the oil and gas industry.

ExxonMobil's Eric Kocian heads this subcommittee, and he provided the update to the greater group. "We all saw this new discipline as being very important because most engineering curricula only require one IT course, usually programming… there is little training available after university to provide engineers with the basics of IT," Kocian said.

In order to address this problem, and to get young IT students interested in a career in the oil and gas industry, Kocian identified the five primary tasks that the subcommittee must perform:

• Define – Create job descriptions and career paths for a young professional in the new hybrid discipline
• Recruit – Work out a university-industry collaborative model that dictates how industry and campus hires are recruited
• Certify – Develop certification programs to improve discipline visibility and credibility
• Train – Identify potential training
• Interact – Interface with other groups in the IT and engineering arenas to communicate its message and responsibilities and solicit feedback.

"The subcommittee has already made good progress in defining job descriptions, and with those in hand we will be ready to start the dialogue with various universities about setting up a curriculum," said Mahdavi. The subcommittee has been charged with providing another progress report in time for this November's board meeting, at the ATCE 2007 in Anaheim, California, U.S.A.

IT Events Subcommittee

"This subcommittee has two main goals: to sponsor meetings and major industry IT conferences, and to work with other industry organizations to bring IT and digital oilfield initiatives under the umbrella of SPE. These goals are ultimately aligned to bring more IT professionals into the oil and gas industry." With that statement, Randy Clark of Energistics began his subcommittee's summary of activities since the first board meeting.

The subcommittee conducted a survey of the IT event landscape, and Clark reported that in any given year there are multiple conference held by both SPE and other organizations. There is no coordination of conference topics, speakers, locations, or dates amongst the groups. The IT initiatives set forth within these organizations are generally viewed as being developed in silos without communication between the people involved.

In addition, there are redundant topics and speakers, and major events are held too close together, forcing potential attendees to choose which ones they will attend. Finally, there is no easy way for the potential audience to figure out which event may be best suited for its needs, resulting in attendee and vendor confusion and a strain on resources.

In order to address these challenges, the subcommittee has identified several starting actions:

• Create a list of events on a one-year rolling basis
• Provide marketing/communication for ITTS
• Build a “Speakers Bureau.”

Clark sought agreement from the greater section members on these starting actions, which also included obtaining the necessary resources to support the subcommittee in moving forward.

Oilfield Integration Subcommittee

Yanni Charalambous of Oxy shared his Oilfield Integration subcommittee's mission with the rest of section:

"Facilitate implementation of the digital oilfield by integration of information technology, people, processes by identifying opportunities for improvement and supporting the development and implementation of information technology integration solutions, standards, and best practices spanning the business, surface, and subsurface domains."

In keeping with this mission, the subcommittee discussed several actions, including:

• Publish a definition/scope of Oilfield Systems Integration
• Develop solution frameworks
• Plug-in with existing activities in the industry related to oilfield systems integration
• Collect and publish case studies, best practices, and use cases scenarios related to oilfield systems integration
• Encourage more O&G and Oilfield Services participation.

On the first item, Charalambous said that oilfield integration means different things to different people and the scope can be very large. Therefore, the first step the group must take is to define what is meant by oilfield systems integration.

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