The Digital Cloud

I came across this article in E&P magazine describing the benefits of creating a Facebook for the Oil and Gas Industry. The article actually starts off talking about fairly standard information portals using the example of a portal developed at ConocoPhillips. The article talks about the importance and need for preserving and giving access to institutional knowledge and cites the well recognised industry problem of an aging workforce as one of the main drivers for having such a portal.

There is a description of the portal that gives role based access to varied information such as current production and various key performance indicators etc. and is similar to what is provided by many portal products. The ConocoPhillips portal supports the need to work in virtual teams with team members based in different locations and this where the social aspect begins to become important, with the use of discussion boards cited as an example of where company wide collaboration helped solved a major operational issue.

The article then moves on to look at the next generation of information portals which are defined as being more dynamic and fluid with social media tools like blogs, micro-blogs, wikis, and social networking integrating in with the traditional functionality to enhance business productivity.

"The portal of tomorrow also acts as a hub for a user’s daily work activities. A petroleum engineer, for example, may start his or her day by opening a personal site on the portal. This page is similar in look and feel to a Facebook profile, allowing the engineer to post relevant information such as personal details, documents, contacts and knowledge areas. The user can also subscribe to news feeds containing events and alerts associated with entities they manage such as wells, fields or equipment."

The article finishes by going through a scenario of an engineer reacting to an alert in her newsfeed and the implication is that this is the reality of the ConocoPhillips portal today, though this is not clear.

I like the idea of the personal information portal and I do think that it is one place in the work environment where we need to tie all the information feeds together, and acts as an aid to collaboration. Not so sure about the knowledge capture aspect that is cited as a major business driver.

Any thoughts?