IT's main goal is to support the organizational mission and ambitions, which requires stakeholder input. IT must effectively manage data, but this data belongs to the enterprise, not IT. IT's goodwill with the business is the most valuable asset they have, and it must be nurtured through effective business relationships and stakeholder management programs.
IT leaders cannot achieve important goals without the input and support of the business. Key technology projects and initiatives like risk management, cost optimization, and effective strategy require collaboration with business counterparts. Without this collaboration, IT leaders will struggle to implement significant changes and improvements.
Build an effective strategy and set of practices for working with business stakeholders. This includes understanding their priorities and requirements, defining value drivers, and using a balanced value framework to prioritize opportunities.
Improve IT's ability to meet business goals, enhance execution of business activities, and create a culture of trust and empowerment with product owners.
Embed Business Relationship Management in IT
Assess the Value Drivers Within Your Solutions
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IT is often seen as a cost center, and senior management frequently targets IT operations and projects for quick savings. IT leaders must prioritize cost considerations by developing an effective budget aligned with an IT strategic plan that anticipates risks and opportunities.
The IT budget is scrutinized by senior management and the board, making accuracy and appropriateness crucial. The budget is essential for enabling the strategic growth of both IT and the organization. Without a well-constructed budget, IT leaders cannot secure the necessary resources to drive important initiatives.
Capture, analyze, and communicate IT spending and staffing to showcase IT's value to the business. This involves benchmarking against peers and developing a cost optimization strategy.
Create a budget that demonstrates the delivery of business value, aligning IT financial plans with the strategic goals of the organization. This approach ensures that IT investments are justified and contribute to the success of the overall business.
Build Your IT Cost Optimization Roadmap
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Data is often spread across different silos with diverse ownership within oil and gas companies, making it challenging to leverage to its full potential. The ultimate value of the data depends on the organization's strategic priorities, and IT must manage data that may not traditionally fall under its purview.
Technology leaders need a comprehensive overview of existing data sets and flows. While data may have different owners across the organization, IT leaders must identify what data exists, secure it, ensure its availability, and use it to drive innovation. Without this oversight, the organization risks missing out on valuable insights and opportunities for improvement.
Identify key business drivers for an optimized data strategy, build relevant use cases, understand the organization's culture and appetite for data, and ensure a well-articulated vision, principles, and goals for the data strategy.
Understand the current data environment, data management enablers, people, skill sets, roles, and structure. IT leaders need to know their strengths and weaknesses to optimize appropriately.
Build a Robust and Comprehensive Data Strategy
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Data is often scattered across various systems in the oil and gas industry and managed by different groups, introducing challenges in data collection, management, security, and governance. IT must address these issues, including third-party risk management, which is a top concern for executive leadership.
Strategic initiatives require the effective use of data, and in the oil and gas industry, much of this data lies outside systems traditionally managed by IT. For both business value and risk governance reasons, it is crucial to bring together and manage different data sources effectively. Without this integration, organizations risk inefficiencies and missed opportunities.
Discover methods, people, tools, and approaches to ensure a streamlined OT governance model. This includes identifying core business capabilities affected by IT/OT convergence and using best practices to prepare a convergence plan for oil and gas systems.
Educate diverse stakeholders and business unit leaders on the potential impact of converging IT and OT operations. This helps gain their input and buy-in, which are crucial for project success.
Secure IT/OT Convergence
Preparing for Technology Convergence in Manufacturing
Technology leaders in the oil and gas industry are responsible for a variety of mission-critical systems, applications, and devices. In this environment, disaster recovery is an ongoing requirement, and plans must be tested and updated regularly. As business units become more automated and data-dependent, the importance of business continuity increases.
Business continuity and disaster recovery are crucial in a connected world that is increasingly volatile and uncertain. The IT budget will be scrutinized by senior management and the board, making accuracy and appropriateness crucial. The budget is essential for enabling strategic growth and continuity of both IT and the organization.
Keep planning efforts manageable with thorough coverage by implementing a structured and repeatable process for business continuity planning (BCP) that can be applied to one business unit at a time.
Leverage BCP outcomes to refine the IT disaster recovery plan (DRP) objectives and achieve alignment between DRP and BCP. This includes defining appropriate objectives for service downtime and data loss based on business impact.
Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan
Develop a Business Continuity Plan
Integrate Physical Security and Information Security
ESG is crucial for oil and gas shareholders, board members, and senior management, making it equally important for IT. The challenge with ESG measures is that they often fall outside traditional operational reporting structures, yet people expect IT to produce the data.
ESG initiatives rely on strong reporting to external stakeholders who may demand data on initiatives and practices that exist in a fragmented way. IT leaders must proactively address ESG demands and create the necessary data structures. Too often ESG considerations emerge as an afterthought, leading to gaps in reporting and accountability.
Focus ESG program efforts on factors that will have a material impact on company performance and key stakeholders. This involves a clear understanding of the ESG reporting expectations of the board and senior management.
Create a flexible and digital data approach to enable data interoperability and deliver high-quality metrics and performance indicators. This requires collaboration across key business stakeholders to achieve a successful ESG program.
The ESG Imperative and Its Impact on Organizations
Establish a Sustainable ESG Reporting Program
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Oil and gas companies produce enormous volumes of data at every stage of the value chain, from exploration to distribution. This data is typically owned by various stakeholders and comes from diverse sources, such as borehole data and OT and security equipment. The challenge is that this data may not be stored on complementary systems or in well-documented formats.
Senior leaders are increasingly demanding better use of digital assets to create value for the organization. IT leaders must be aware of the available resources, who owns them, and how they can be consolidated. They must act as guides, leading senior management and other business leaders to fulfill their data-related goals.
Begin to corral the data IT owns and the systems that produce it. Even if IT may not own these systems, they have the responsibility to govern and secure these resources effectively.
Bring together siloed digital portfolios for a complete view across the organization. Gain transparency into the health and performance of investments in digital talent, assets, products, and services.
Maximize the Value of IT Across Enterprise Portfolios
Implement Hardware Asset Management
Security is a constant concern for IT leaders and key stakeholders. The biggest emerging challenge is managing the security risk inherent in third-party relationships, such as trading partners and suppliers, especially those providing cloud-based IT services. IT leaders must educate stakeholders on appropriate levels of risk and investment, which is no easy task.
Even if IT and procurement controls are in place to manage third-party risk, IT leaders must be prepared to answer questions from auditors and the board's risk management committee. Effective management of third-party security risk is crucial for maintaining trust and avoiding negative publicity from security incidents.
Establish an end-to-end security risk management process that includes assessment, risk treatment through contracts and monitoring, and periodic reassessments.
Base vendor assessments on the actual risks to the organization to ensure that vendors are committed to the process and that internal resources are available to fully evaluate assessment results.
Build a Vendor Security Assessment Service
Looking at Risk in a New Light: The Six Pillars of Vendor Risk Management
Proactively Identify and Mitigate Vendor Risk
Build an Information Security Strategy
Tomorrow will bring new threats, competitive pressures, and technological opportunities. Even if these technologies are unknown today, you can still prepare by building team capabilities and appropriate IT roles. The challenges often arise from the intersection of operational and information technologies, as well as a range of data sources such as geophysical and royalty data.
Technologies continue to evolve, but it is the people who administer and use these tools that drive project success. IT leaders must review how they are governing and developing their teams, ensuring that people are developed at least as effectively as technology.
Use industry benchmarks to understand how current staff compare to similar organizations in terms of staffing levels and effort allocation. This helps in building a strategic workforce plan that accommodates today's technical demands and tomorrow's opportunities.
Develop internal competencies to take advantage of IT trends, particularly human-AI collaboration and an increasingly challenging security environment. This ensures the team is ready for technological advancements.
Build a Strategic IT Workforce Plan
IT Talent Trends 2024
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The oil and gas industry is known for its ambitious goals and risk-taking, requiring significant investments of time, money, and intellectual effort. However, it is also a conservative sector facing increased demand for energy and competition from alternative sources. This necessitates rapid IT changes, as innovation is not something to be passively received but actively pursued.
Organizations are pressured to achieve cost efficiencies and service improvements that outdated tools cannot provide. Prepare for future challenges by equipping teams and infrastructure for change. Proactively embrace innovation to ensure readiness for tomorrow's demands.
Identify key components necessary for executing innovation initiatives. By understanding their current infrastructure and processes, organizations can pinpoint areas for improvement and prepare for future challenges.
Assess the organization's innovation capabilities in five key areas: organizational excellence, insights and intelligence, agile ideation, team capabilities, and innovation operations. This helps in understanding strengths and weaknesses, providing a roadmap for growth.
Kick-Start IT-Led Business Innovation
Develop an Exponential IT Roadmap
Use ChatGPT Wisely to Improve Productivity
“Info-Tech gives me end-to-end programs – everything’s structured, and it allows you to be structured for success. And that builds that organizational confidence in you to deliver,” Blair said. “I don’t have someone breathing over my shoulder; they trust me.”
James Blair, Group Manager Technology & CISO, Todd Corporation
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