Digital Use Case Library for Oil & Gas

Identify potential digital use cases to transform your organization.

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

When planning a digital transformation effort, the ideation process can seem daunting. Many organizations don’t know where to start or which value levers to pull. It is critical that the organization:

• Choose the appropriate set of value levers.
• Determine whether those value levers and initiatives can meet an organization’s strategic goals.

Choosing the right levers and associated initiatives is crucial for a successful digital transformation.

Common Obstacles

Digital initiatives can drive significant value for organizations, but the challenge lies in identifying the appropriate ones for your specific context and capabilities. Choosing the wrong set of initiatives can result in:

• Initiatives that don’t add significant value for the organization.
• Delayed and over-budget initiatives.

Identifying industry-leading best practices can be helpful in driving early ideation sessions.

Info-Tech’s Approach

Pull inspiration from a curated collection of best-in-class digital use cases to drive the initiative ideation process.

• While implementation details will differ, overall concepts can often be helpful in designing transformation roadmaps.
• Our analysis offers additional guidance on ROI guidelines, primary sources of value, and more.

Pulling best practices from anonymized use cases increases the odds of successful value capture.

Info-Tech Insight

Leverage best-in-class digital use cases and initiative examples to build strong implementation roadmaps and maximize value creation.

Introduction to Digital Transformation

What is digital transformation?

An at-scale change program – planned and executed over a finite time period – with the aspiration of creating material, sustainable improvement in the performance of an organization by deploying a programmatic approach to digital technology adoption and innovation.

Digital transformation can unlock significant value, but getting it right is tough

• Digital transformation can unlock significant profits …

  26% is the average increase in profitability for companies that prioritize digital transformation compared to their industry competitors (MIT, 2013).

• … and be the largest driver of economic growth …

  70% of new value created in the economy over the next decade will be based on digitally enabled platform business models (World Economic Forum, 2023).

• … but beware – most companies fail to achieve their objectives.

  84% of companies that have undertaken initiatives have “failed” – they haven’t seen sustained and material performance improvement (Forbes, 2022).

Info-Tech has a comprehensive approach to help you beat the odds and deliver against your digital transformation aspirations

Digital journey framework

Digital strategy (input to journey) A company’s articulation and approach to using data and technology to support overarching corporate strategy (e.g. portion of corporate strategy enabled by digital investments).	Establish your digital North Star Set aspiration: Vision setting with key business unit (BU) stakeholders to discuss and align on digital aspiration (e.g. Big-T vs. Mini-T; self-funded and slow burn vs. investments).	Quantify the value of digital use cases Assess opportunity: Comprehensive E2E understanding of the digital opportunity across BUs/functions (e.g. data analysis, process walks, and interviews).	Create the digital roadmap Design and plan: Bottom-up initiative design and holistic initiative roadmap planning (e.g. opportunity to initiatives, financials, phasing, design principles).	Deliver digital use cases and realize impact Execute: Detailed initiative builds and implementation; execution with rigor and transparency (e.g. process optimization then automation, test, measure, scale).
	Create the infrastructure to drive and sustain change Enable: Set up the transformation infrastructure, operating model, and culture to drive value capture and sustain change.

Digital journey asset catalog

This piece of research is part of Info-Tech’s digital journey asset catalog. The topics addressed within this document are most applicable to activities in phases 2 and 3 of the digital journey framework. Visit the Digital Transformation Center to find the full catalog of available materials.

Digital Transformation Center

Info-Tech’s approach and team can help irrespective of where you are in your transformation journey

Where are you in the journey?	Establish your digital North Star	Quantify the value of digital use cases	Create the digital roadmap	Deliver digital use cases and realize impact	Create the infrastructure to drive and sustain change
	Set aspiration: Vision setting with key BU stakeholders to discuss and align on digital aspiration (e.g. Big-T vs. Mini-T; self-funded and slow burn vs. investments).	Assess opportunity: Comprehensive E2E understanding of the digital opportunity across BU/functions (e.g. data analysis, process walks, and interviews).	Design and plan: Bottom-up initiative design and planning (e.g. opportunity to initiatives, financials, phasing, design principles).	Execute: Detailed initiative builds and implementation; execution with rigor and transparency (e.g. process optimization then automation, test, measure, scale).	Enable: Set up the transformation infrastructure, operating model, and culture to drive value capture and sustain change.
Examples of how Info-Tech can help	Digital North Star placemat (e.g. industry trends, top-down opportunity, high-level planning)	Digital maturity assessments (e.g. current state digital adoption and transformation readiness)	Initiative bottom-up design (e.g. initiative ideation and business case creation, workplan, investments)	Initiative build (e.g. zero-based process redesign with technology)	Transformation infrastructure (e.g. transformation program design, transformation office)
		Opportunity assessments (e.g. BUs/function value creation diagnostics, opportunity levers)	Holistic initiative planning (e.g. phasing, interdependencies, investments)	Initiative implementation (e.g. testing and pilot, scale-up roadmap, performance tracking)	IT modernization (e.g. technology infrastructure required to execute digital levers)
				Value assurance assessment (e.g. course correcting and accelerating initiatives underway)	Change management (e.g. org-wide change program and stories, comms, governance)
	The following content will provide an overview of digital use cases in Oil & Gas. This will support opportunity assessments across the organization’s value chain. Note: This does not provide the value/ROI specific to your organization. To do that, detailed current state assessments and opportunity assessments need to be executed.				Performance management (e.g. KPIs – leading and lagging, people mgmt. for continuous improvement)
					Workforce management (e.g. upskilling, right people, right place, right time)

Executive Summary

Analyst Perspective

Acceleration to your digital North Star.

Digital transformation within the oil & gas industry is crucial in this decade. Strengthening core capabilities through technological advancements is essential for building resilience against multi-dimensional volatility, including geopolitical influences, the impact of COVID-19, global economic downturns, and other unforeseeable challenges.

Approaching digitalization as isolated pilot projects may present challenges in scalability and maintainability. A strategic focus on planning, scaling, and adopting a holistic view of digital transformation is paramount for achieving well-defined and measurable business objectives.

This report offers a framework for strategy leaders within the oil & gas organizations to proactively scan the market and continuously evaluate digital use cases. This forward-thinking approach ensures adaptability and fosters resilience throughout the digital transformation journey.

Jing Wu Principal Research Director Industry Research Info-Tech Research Group

Introduction

Document purpose:

1. Present Info-Tech’s digital use case structure organized around technologies, capabilities, and industries/functions.
2. Highlight a selection of the top digital use cases in the industry that can be developed into actionable initiatives to capture value in a digital transformation.
3. Introduce Info-Tech’s full library that can be mined for additional use cases.

This document is not:

• A comprehensive list of every possible digital use case within an industry.
• A guarantee of the value from particular use cases for individual organizations.
• A guide to perform a top-down assessment of value from digital use cases or to develop use cases into initiatives.

Outcome

Understand the top digital use cases to drive value in the electric utilities industry.

Applicable Info-Tech support models for this content

• DIY Toolkit

  “Our team has already made this critical project a priority and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

• Consulting

  “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take on this project. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

Your challenge

Determine the correct value levers to drive your organization toward its goals.

The potential breadth (every business unit/function) and depth (redesign of core processes) of digital transformation means tremendous value and competitive advantage can be created. However, the success of that value creation relies upon choosing, prioritizing, and developing the appropriate value levers and associated initiatives according to likelihood of success and alignment with the digital transformation’s strategic objectives. This document will help you identify potential use cases that could be built into value-driving initiatives.

Choosing appropriate use cases is key to a successful digital transformation.

Common obstacles

Common pitfalls make initiative identification difficult for many organizations.

Don’t give in on pressure to go digital without clarity on value: Avoid going digital for the sake of being digital or because everyone is doing “xyz.” The organization needs to be clear on the source of value and the magnitude of the value an initiative can deliver.

Strong change management must address organizational inertia and complacency: change can be hard, and without a starting point to start ideation/prioritization, established technologies that drive significant value can be left unadopted. Understanding the top digital opportunity areas within an industry/function, the technological maturity, and implementation feasibility can help motivate action.

Digital use case library – Oil & Gas

Leverage best-in-class digital use cases to build strong implementation roadmaps and maximize value creation.

Digital Transformation Center

Digital use case

A technology or combination of technologies applied to a specific capability (e.g. job to be done) within a given industry or function to create value.

What is a use case?

• Industry or function
  The relevant industry or function a use case applies to (many use cases will apply across multiple industries/functions).
• Capability
  The activities or job(s) to be done that your organization performs to ultimately deliver a product/service.
• Technology
  The base technology a use case uses that enables value-creating performance gains.

What is covered by each use case?

• Adoption rate
  Estimation of how prevalent a use case has become in the industry.
• Technology
  The base technology applied to deliver the use case.
• Technology maturity
  Estimation of how close the technology is to reaching an advanced stage of maturity.
• Source of value
  How the use case typically delivers value based on six categories of value.
• Implementation feasibility
  High-level approximation of how difficult it is to implement the use case.

Measure the value of this document

Document objective

Highlight best-in-class use cases to spur the initiative planning and ideation process.

Measuring your success against that objective

There are multiple qualitative and quantitative, direct and indirect, metrics for which you can measure the progress of your initiative pipeline’s development. Some examples of this are:

• Increased initiative pipeline value.
• Number of capabilities impacted by initiative pipeline.
• Enhanced understanding of initiatives’ impact aligned to organization’s capability map.
• Better understanding of which sources of value are being addressed or under-addressed in the organization’s initiative pipeline.

Methodology