At the recent Stephenson and Associates conference on Data Management Inda Immega from Pecten gave a revealing talk on data management as implemented by this Shell subsidiary. While others pontificate on data models and play with objects of one sort and another, Pecten have adopted a more a pragmatic approach. A survey of Shell users showed islands of satisfaction separated by data exchange bottlenecks. With 6 layoffs in 7 years, projects had become people-bound. A need was identified for a shared data repository and tools for moving data in and out. This was to be an efficiency based project (there are inefficiency based projects? - there probably are too!) The IT group was down from 12 to 2 and a decision was made to support no more than one tool to do one job (some smaller databases were abandoned). Archiving was to be built in. Note that 5 years ago the idea was to have all digital data accessible via a GIS. This has proved un-realistic. Today the main aims are
They are not (currently at least) concerned with
So typical activities are
Pecten use the Tigress data model, with replication of data to remote sites (PCs). Immega says Shell are converging towards industry solutions in the same direction as POSC & PPDM without following the same steps. Personally I found the Pecten approach, refreshingly practical issues. While we were was miles away from Data Models and BPR, such realism is more likely to impact positively on Business than most any of the other processes.
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