IBM has just published a 150 page Redbook, ‘Discovering the business value patterns of an integrated information framework’ (IBM IIF), the first of two Redbooks covering IBM’s Chemicals and Petroleum (C&P) industry solution. IBM IIF is a environment where a whole lexicon of oil and process industry standards from OPC-UA, through ISO 15926 to PRODML have been ‘integrated’ via WebSphere and its Rational Software Architect graphical modeler. The IIF supports a changing IT environment and portfolio, ‘flexible business requires flexible information technology.’ The IIF builds on components and a services oriented architecture. Target activities include real-time oil and gas exploration and production. The Redbook ploughs through the usual marketing benefits of SAO and enumerates a whole slug of benefits that IBM’s infrastructure provides including asset monitoring, security, dashboards and automation to name just a few. The thesis is that C&P, like other industries suffers from poor information access and visibility. Other challenges include productivity, aging workforce and data and information management.
Different requirements, for application efficiency and IT simplicity, have led to the operations/IT ‘dilemma’ that is hampering progress in the intelligent oilfield. An engineering leadership/IT partnership is needed to overcome this.
The Redbook proposes ‘solution patterns’ based on the IIF. Here, ‘metadata is the key.’ All this is driven by the Solution Studio, that adapts the IIF to different business problems. Document management also gets a plug—leveraging IBM’s Lotus text and workflow environment. The Redbook suffers from being far too wordy, stringing out a rather thin technical content with a vast amount of marketing mumbo-jumbo. The section on standards is fairly informative as is the general background on upstream IT. Whether anyone interested in either of these topics will rush to read this obscurely titled oeuvre is not so clear. Download the Redbook from www.oilit.com/links/0907_2
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