Improve the flow, improve efficiency: Standards are key

No, I’m not talking about oil and gas flow, at least not directly. I’m talking about the flow of data throughout the operations technology, technical applications and line-of-business (LOB) systems used along the oil and gas value chain.

We’re nearly 10 years into the “digital oilfield” (DOF), but, as an industry, we’ve yet to realize the productivity gains that DOF promised—in large part because of data incompatibility among the various technologies, apps, and systems.

The level of seamless information flow among all of these apps and systems correlates directly with the level of operational efficiency. Improved data flow means we can gain deeper technical and business insights faster, which means better decisions faster—decisions that can have a real impact on the bottom line.

Like many companies, we at Microsoft believe data exchange standards are crucial to solving this data traffic jam. Open standards such as Energistics’ Well Information Transfer Standard Markup Language (WITSML) are demonstrating the gains in efficiency that can be made when data flows seamlessly.

Few people will argue against the benefit of standards. But most people will agree that the initial adoption and implementation of standards can be challenging.

To support and facilitate standards adoption and implementation, Microsoft has become a member of Energistics, the upstream oil and gas standards consortium (www.energistics.org).

Our strategy is to deliver products that support open standards, right out of the box. This approach lowers adoption hurdles, increases usage, and enables oil and gas industry customers to better execute their strategies for E&P information sharing and business process integration.

We’ve also participated directly in the standards development process by collaborating with Energistics and Shell to implement a PRODML proof-of-concept using Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform.

Post a comment. Tell us about your experience with data standards.