The Digital Cloud

Information Management is an enormous challenge and in this next series of posts I am going share some of the issues we face in my particular industry. This was originally going to be one post but the challenges are so numerous that it would of ended up being a very long post, so I am going to tackle each in turn. Then I hope to discuss what is it that is missing (if anything at all) from our current approach and try to answer the question I asked in my previous post why do information management? After that .... well lets just see how it goes.

I think that anyone who is close to the information management effort knows what an huge challenge it is. Anyone who thinks they can work on indexing, identifying, cleaning up and capturing information in some database for a few months and the problem is solved is in for a shock. My industry, the oil industry has being doing information management for years and years and we still have many problems. The oil industry does capture/use/generate an extraordinary amount of information but I am sure the challenges are similar to the ones faced by whatever industry you work in.

Information challenges

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published a report from its recent December 2008 workshop on the potential for the semantic web to play a key role in the oil and gas industry. The semantic web is coming and it is going to help in a lot of ways but what really caught my eye was the keynote presentation by Chevron.  This sets the scene for this series, quite nicely presenting some of the main challenges all oil companies are facing today.

In the next post we will look at the first challenge the data explosion!