It’s been 25 years since Bill Gates declared, “Content is king.” And how right he was. Today, content truly reigns supreme, with on-demand access at every turn. From streaming services to social media, content practically lands in our laps, personalized to our interests and always within reach.
But in the Energy sector, we seem to go back in time. Information is spread across siloed systems, such as company shared drives, enterprise content management (ECM) systems or enterprise asset management (EAM) systems, with little integration or automation across applications and databases. This creates high levels of inefficiency, with employees sent off to hunt and gather content. That’s about as far from agile and transformative as an organization can be.
Across Oil and Gas, Utilities and Chemical companies, poor access to content in the Energy sector does more than hurt productivity. It also opens the door to operational and safety risks, impeding critical activities such as maintenance effectiveness, asset integrity and supply chain optimization.
Just how accessible is your organization’s content? Here’s a quick test: Can you find needed information in three minutes or less? And, when you find it, is it correct?
Sure, this might be simplifying it a bit. But that’s the point: getting access to timely and trusted content to support business and process decisions should be seamless.
Digital or not digital? That is the question
Yes, many energy companies are on the path to digital transformation. But exactly how far into the journey they are depends on who you ask. In our recent survey of US Oil & Gas companies, 33 percent acknowledge they have digitized only a few of their processes and documents. And 15 percent had yet to start any implementation of a digital strategy. This survey will be released in the coming weeks.
Regarding operations and workforce management, we dug deeper, asking which processes are digitally available. While standard operating procedures (69 percent) and work orders (68 percent) were broadly digitized, other key processes lagged. These included inspection reports (51 percent), piping and instrument diagrams and training documents (51 percent), operator logs (47 percent), regulatory reports (44 percent), worker assignments (38 percent) and shift management (29 percent).
Here’s the reality: If organizations don’t have in place a solid information management foundation—as well as a plan to create and embed digital competency to effectively manage the content that underpins the business—it doesn’t really matter what is digitized.
Enter the cloud.
The cloud: Simplifying the democratization of asset content
The cloud can help Energy companies reinvent business processes, acting as an enabler to connect content with the people and systems that need it. With content in the cloud, organizations get people out of silos by providing fast, reliable access to information within an authoritative repository—a single source of truth.
By integrating content into critical business applications, such as project or maintenance management, you connect content with the process. This gives employees relevant information and helps you realize even more value from content and data.
Access is also immediate and available from anywhere. This is critical for dispersed teams, whether they’re working remotely or spread across plants or field locations.
By getting the right information to the right people at the right time, you create informed and connected workers. That’s when the magic happens—enabling intelligent operations.
A foundation for intelligent operations
OpenText’s Asset Information Management for Energy solutions lays the groundwork to fundamentally change how people work, for the better. This goes well beyond digitizing content. It layers in integrated solutions to connect information with business processes, providing a complete view into content that is tied to work orders, engineering documents, process safety information and more. And this allows you to pass the three-minute test with ease.
Intelligent operations powered by the cloud help personnel make better and faster decisions, accelerating information exchange and collaboration. And it all starts with one thing: quick access to timely and trustworthy content.
Ready to make content king in your organization?
Learn more about Asset Information Management for Energy from OpenText.
