It is important to examine the digital transformation that is guiding the evolution of the industry and better understand the critical role trust plays as companies learn to compete in a more digital world. Reimagining how you bring together people, data, and processes to create value and maintain a competitive advantage in a digital-first world. Data is central to this new approach, and Nadella believes a shift in corporate culture is required to bring people, data, and processes together in a new way. Oil and gas executives associate digital business transformation with operational efficiencies, cost reductions, and increased productivity. Because of the range of activities performed in an offshore environment, such improvements are only attainable via extensive use of data to perform meaningful correlations. Operators can gather more data at higher frequency rates to rationalize activities, simplify workflows, optimize maintenance activities and improve well and reservoir management. This is possible because the cost of sensors and processing equipment going down while their capabilities are increasing.
It is possible to temporarily store high-frequency data locally and transmit data centrally at various sample rates, depending on the level of detail required for remote analysis. High-frequency data can be used locally to perform initial validation steps while compute-intensive mining and algorithm optimization can be performed centrally. The resulting improved algorithm from central processing can then be pushed back to the edge units to keep improving the data quality of the edge processing. Algorithms at the place of collection also can help correlate near-real-time data feeds to create synthetic data when a value is erroneous or missing and eliminate outliers. Essential correlations to be discovered and valuable discernments to be extracted, data analysts and SMEs should sit together and leverage one another’s expertise. In today’s world of remote workers, this poses a challenge, new organizational behavior skills need to be learned. Digital transformation that is underway will have a direct and profound impact on the way work is organized and how relationships are maintained in the future and will necessitate environments of trust in a world where telepresence and remote work are no longer anomalies but business as usual.