The exploration industry has a persistent challenge in managing digital assets. Data is recorded in different methods by different service providers… Data is used across different software, and therefore derivatives may be in different projects and formats… It comes into your organization via different channels. And most data has a greographic context, which brings its own challenges. It can be tough to just answer the query: “Show me all the data relevant to this lease.”
Moreover, our understanding of the subsurface is constantly evolving. So updating data (or preventing the use of out-dated data) is another challenge.
Add to this all the normal challenges of IT data warehousing (like security, redundancy, search, speed & space) and you have multiple full-time jobs on your hands.
When analyzing data management challenges we recommend looking at 5 dimensions: Reception, Discovery, Indexing, Querying and Updating. For each of these dimensions we look at the current state of Practice, Policy and Technology. We also revisit each of the dimensions to ask what the Ideal scenarios would be.
The resulting matrix can be refined, and then used to suggest improvements to policies and technologies. If the response to any of the questions is “None” this is clearly an area for improvement.
For example, it is common to handle data reception in a very ad hoc way. That is, there is no policy associated with reception.
They emailed me the latest well log; I’ll forward it to you but it doesn’t have the X/Y’s. The coordinates are in the LAS from last week.
It is also common for there to be no technology associated with automatic discovery. And this is unfortunate because much technology exists in this area.
Contact us if we can help your team conduct this analysis. We would be happy to spend a couple hours at your offices.
May 5 , 2015 
