Given the diversity of starting points and the variety of options, oil and gas companies could benefit from a coherent framework that helps them achieve their short-term business objectives, measures their digital progression through stages of evolution and, above all, provides them with a path to ultimately transform the core of their operations, real assets and the business model itself.
The Digital Operations Transformation Model (DOT) is a guide or “road map” that describes how an organization can move forward in its digitalization. This model divides the transformation process into 10 steps, or “milestones”. Every time an organization completes a milestone, it means that it has achieved an important business objective and has strengthened its digital and cybersecurity infrastructure.
Although the process itself has 10 stages, the idea isn't to stop there. Once an area of the company has reached stage 10, the model suggests that this “digital journey” be expanded to other areas or assets of the organization, and that it continue indefinitely to adapt to new challenges and opportunities. Eventually, this transformation would encompass the entire company, including external elements such as the supply chain and business partners.
First of all, we have companies that mechanize the process using hydraulic, pneumatic or electrical control systems. This can allow actors to anticipate and prepare for failures and unusual conditions. The journey then moves towards capturing information from the physical world (from physical to digital) by sensorizing equipment and transmitting data generated in the field using IT networks. By doing this, an oil and gas company can respond to field conditions and monitor operations remotely.
The next set of milestones can be achieved when a company breaks operational silos across disciplines, obtains hidden productivity gains, improves data usability, and identifies new areas of value creation. To do this, the transformation must move from the integration of diverse data (using servers, data standards, to solve problems in the cloud), to the analysis and visualization of data using state-of-the-art platforms and computers (for example, analysis of big data, wearables and interactive workstations) to augmented decision-making (for example, self-learning machines).
Generally, in the field of oil and gas, digital thinking and narratives focus on evidence-based knowledge. But to become a digital leader, a company must consider making a change in its physical world by modernizing its core assets (in this case, platforms, equipment and facilities). In other words, you must complete the last three stages of the journey of Bytes to the barrels closing the physical-digital-physical cycle.
