Paul Maurer's blog

“Real-time decision-making” is getting more attention in the intelligent energy field these days. David Latin, Executive Co-chair of the SPE Intelligent Energy 2010 Conference, outlines the theme of this year's conference by saying that “Real-time decision making has moved from delivering data to people to packaging the information to help people make decisions in real time affecting the bottom line.”

This evolution is encouraging, but it only addresses part of the challenge. Is “packaging information” enough to help you to make complex operational decisions in changing conditions?

We're going to hear a lot more about using software that takes an active role in our decision making process.

After attending the Intelligent Energy Conference in Amsterdam last February, I was struck by Karl Jeffrey’s Letter from the Editor in the April/May 2008 issue of Digital Energy Journal. Much of what he says in “Please can we call this IT again?” is accurate.

In my previous post, I referred to “disruption management”. The application of disruption management techniques can use decision support software and analytic methods to cope with the impact of disruptions on a plan, a schedule, or an operational system.

According to the January 2008 edition of the Energy Insights Insights on Oil & Gas Newsletter, “[The] Pressure is on to increase recovery rates from known reserves given the expense of exploration.” And, “The Digital Oil field will see continued growth with enhanced production optimization.” In response, the authors state, “Oil and gas companies will look to tools for project and portfolio management, especially analytics that are able to support optimization.”

Recent financial news in the enterprise software sector is bubbling with stories about behemoths like IBM, Oracle, and SAP gobbling up Business Intelligence (BI) vendors like Cognos, Hyperion, and Business Objects, respectively.

We’re hearing a lot about the aging workforce in the Oil and Gas business press. According to Jill Feblowitz at IDC Energy Insights, for example, as older workers retire and the industry experiences a reduction of highly experienced workers, investments in technology to make the remaining workers more effective are a must if the industry is going to meet the ever-increasing demand for energy.

Asset Performance Management (APM) is an evolving software category that supports business processes, workflows, data capture, analytics, and optimization to improve production availability, reliability and output.