The Digital Cloud

The article in E&P magazine describing the benefits of creating a Facebook for the Oil and Gas Industry that I discussed in my previous post actually was prompted by the Oil & Gas Industry Collaboration Survey 2009 which was conducted by Microsoft and Accenture - available here. This is an interesting survey from a collaboration and more general IM point of view.

The survey had responses from more than 270 oil and gas industry professionals of all backgrounds and experience from all over the world working in both upstream and downstream. The survey asked some pretty specific questions about the use and potential of collaboration tools, including tools such as instant messaging, wikis and blogs. The survey came out with some interesting facts. Here are the quoted key findings;

• Forty percent of oil and gas professionals view new social media tools as useful to boost collaboration and productivity at work, but only one in four report using these newer tools to capture and share information internally.
• The majority view collaboration and knowledge-sharing as important for critical initiatives, such as capital projects, well management and the health and safety of workers. Conversely, most respondents stated that their organizations are still using older means of collaboration, such as face-to-face meetings, e-mails and phone calls.
• More than 60 percent of respondents reported spending over one hour a day searching for information and knowledge sources relevant to the jobs.
• Industry professionals are concerned about the need to capture knowledge from experienced workers before they retire or leave the company.
• Only one-third of the respondents believe that their companies are fully prepared to exploit the enhanced sharing and capturing of the company’s intellectual capital.

From a general information management point of view point three that states over 60% of respondents spend over an hour a day looking for information sources relevant to their job, is interesting. The survey equates this to a loss to the industry of $485 Million a not insignificant sum. If you then think about stated statistics from Chevron that a "significant amount of time (30-70%) is spent looking for and assessing the quality of the data found " then between them there is a serious business case for IM, collaboration technologies and data quality!

What do you think?