With their permission we have extracted the figures for the main EU oil companies and present them in the table below. It is much easier to say why such studies are flawed than to draw meaningful conclusions from such broad-brush data. For instance, what is an oil company? Some of these figures include large downstream or even non-oil and gas components. What is an employee?
Caveat
A company that posts a low IT spend may have achieved this by outsourcing a whole service such that the IT component is hidden in an asset's budget. Notwithstanding the caveats, we present these figures for your perusal.
Company |
Employees |
IT Spend (M$) |
IT spend/ employee ($) |
Turnover/ Employee k$ |
IT Spend/ Turnover |
Turnover (M$) |
RWE |
136 646 |
405 |
2 963 |
278 |
1.06% |
38 047 |
Veba |
123 046 |
464 |
3 772 |
384 |
0.98% |
47 256 |
British Gas |
54 754 |
222 |
4 048 |
249 |
1.63% |
13 618 |
Total |
41 803 |
179 |
4 282 |
620 |
0.69% |
25 921 |
OMV |
9 994 |
43 |
4 336 |
743 |
0.58% |
7 423 |
ENI |
91 544 |
398 |
4 342 |
358 |
1.21% |
32 758 |
BP |
58 150 |
324 |
5 563 |
983 |
0.57% |
57 168 |
Elf Aquitaine |
89 500 |
683 |
7 626 |
440 |
1.73% |
39 367 |
Norsk Hydro |
32 353 |
259 |
7 995 |
398 |
2.01% |
12 870 |
Lasmo |
1 296 |
13 |
9 774 |
778 |
1.26% |
1 009 |
Repsol |
18 616 |
226 |
12 122 |
962 |
1.26% |
17 913 |
Royal Dutch Shell |
104 000 |
1 583 |
15 224 |
1 060 |
1.44% |
110 192 |
Petrofina |
13 653 |
241 |
17 652 |
1 401 |
1.26% |
19 122 |
Enterprise |
597 |
15 |
25 405 |
1 996 |
1.27% |
1 191 |
Average |
55 425 |
361 |
8 936 |
761 |
1.21% |
30 275 |
Some correlation can be seen between the head count and turnover, and between IT spend and turnover. But the graph of IT spend per employee against turnover shows very little correlation. This may be because IT spend is generally disconnected from headcount, so that just because you work for a company with high turnover and a big IT budget, it doesn't necessarily figure that you will have a whopper of a workstation on your desk. This will come as no surprise to the beleaguered data management departments throughout the E&P world. Overall the spread of IT expenditure per employee goes from $3,000 per annum to over $25,000.
SAP's secret
The comparison with the world at large places the oil business in a mid to low end of the range position in terms of the percentage of gross revenues spent on IT. Banks and financial services top the chart with up to 9% of turnover spent on IT. Interestingly, some software companies such as SAP and CAP Gemini have very small IT expenditure over turnover per se; 1% in both cases - perhaps they know something we don't!
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