Around 90 turned out for the 3rd annual ‘Standards Summit’ hosted by Energistics in Houston last month. CEO Randy Clark reported that corporate membership has doubled in the last two years to over 100. Mike Strathman (AspenTech) summarized standards of importance to the upstream tracing the evolution of the POSC/Caesar data model into the present day ISO 15926—described as a ‘somewhat seamless’ vendor-neutral interface used notably in tools such as Aveva’s PDMS. In production and operations the situation is more complex with the ‘challenge’ of the process industry ISA-S95 standard—said to be ‘very active.’
Chevron fellow Jim Crompton described the challenge of standards deployment in a major oil company. Chevron has been involved with POSC for some time but still struggles with the move from pilot to adoption. Crompton notes issues such as standard ‘ownership’ and support, corporate culture, and the cost of change and the benefit of adoption. Frequently the beneficiaries of change may be mismatched. Producers may think, ‘Our job is to produce oil not to have a good IT.’ And all of this is happening in the face of an explosive growth of data volumes. Crompton suggests that, ‘planning for a journey not a sprint’ is part of the answer noting that ‘sprints always fail however interesting. Well data log is still on WITS and has not moved to WITSML!’ The real challenge is to see a standard all the way to adoption.
PSN Kutty (ONGC) suggested there are opportunities to reduce cycle times in geophysical work processes with enhancements to the SEG’s standards portfolio. ONGC estimates it could avoid 83 person days/year with better standards. These should address acquisition, logistics and velocity data and XML-based data exchange. Improved SEG standards are also required for seismic processing.
Michael Rowell’s (Oracle) presentation on global standardization was well received. Rowell outlined Oracle’s approach to standards—in particular the UN CEFACT Core Components Technical Specification* (CCTS) e-business standard. CCTS core and infrastructure standards are stable but standards content ‘is like the wild west!’ Rowell sees hope from growing cross industry collaboration needs—particularly in the context of services-oriented architecture ‘governance.’
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