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Oil and Gas Software: Moving the Needle on Decision Making

Oil and Gas Software and Lack of Integration

The Harvard Business Review posted a blog this week called, “Four Areas Where Senior Leaders Should Focus Their Attention,” that applies to how leaders in the energy industry should look at oil and gas software.

The first area is to focus on “decisions that move the needle.” As the author, Peter Bregman points out, “If there aren’t enough zeros, the decision isn’t strategic enough and shouldn’t absorb senior leadership time.”

Decision makers should be looking at the big picture when it comes to production numbers, for example. Oftentimes the data that provides that overview is fragmented amongst several different pieces of oil and gas software. ProCount has some of the numbers, an Excel spreadsheet that lives on the fileshare has others, and Tobin Enterprise Land has the rest.

So instead of reviewing a high level dashboard, busy executives must waste valuable time sifting through reports to make meaning of them before the tough needle moving decisions can ever be made.

Oil and gas software should make busy executive’s lives easier. When software doesn’t do that, it’s time to take a hard look at why not, and what can be done to transform these tools into decision making powerhouses.

See how one Entrance client made oil and gas software work for them in this case study.

Making Decisions as a Company

The second area of awareness was to move the “big arrow.” Bregman describes the big arrow as the overall vision for the company, like strategic direction and core values. There are also a lot of little arrows within the big one that individual people focus on, related to projects, closing business, etc.

Moving the needle with oil and gas software“The CEO and his or her leadership team own that big arrow. The problem is that, often, the little arrows point in different directions as people solidify their silos, bicker amongst themselves, and neglect the larger mission.”

One way that this misalignment can occur for oil and gas is when people are operating under different information. The accounting department may have a different version of the truth than G&G. Even when some systems are connected, do the numbers get updated on a timely basis?

When this wrong information rolls up to the executive level, this means that across the board neither the big arrows or the little ones are moving in the right direction.

One way to tackle this problem is to make business intelligence an organizational goal. From the top line down, your company must be committed to working in ways that enable intelligent decision making.

For more on getting started, read this post based on the Professional Petroluem Data Management Association’s presentation called,”What is a well?”

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