Last month’s survey brought a strong endorsement for Oil IT Journal’s evolution from a relatively narrow publication focusing on E&P data to its current broad coverage of IT as it impacts oil and gas. Almost 90% of responses were ‘broad coverage is good,’ supported by comment such as, ‘we can learn from nearby industries,’ ‘you reflect the growing inter-connectedness of systems’ and ‘interdisciplinary use of data means the broader scope makes sense.’
Opinions were divided on the print vs. online edition. 60% read Oil IT Journal mostly online, 30% read both editions and 11% of respondents read only on paper although this is likely a biased sample.
All of our regular features were rated as ‘important, a regular read’ with the ‘Software, hardware short takes’ section just beating the Editorial for the top slot. Similarly coverage of all of the ‘occasional’ features was rated as ‘about right’ with, interestingly the ‘Going green’ section just leading the ‘Consortium corner’ feature for popularity. Negative (‘do not read’) scores for both regular and occasional features were all around and below 10%.
Asking ‘Why do you read Oil IT Journal’ was, of course, fishing for compliments and we were not disappointed. An upstream IT professional working for a large independent summed things up as follows ‘I have been working in oil and gas IT for over 20 years, and Oil IT is my leading source for information. Editor Neil McNaughton has a keen mind and a talent for absorbing and summarizing information, providing context across an impressive breadth of topics. It is valuable to find a publication that takes such highly technical subject matter and renders it readable for those who are not experts in the field. Reading Oil IT piques my curiosity and encourages me to learn more! It’s helpful to read about the conferences that I cannot attend, and even more interesting to compare Oil IT with my own notes on conferences that I did attend, to get additional insight and see what I may have missed.’
Ideas for improving Oil IT Journal included a ‘major website re-vamp’ (the current site was described as like a village newsletter from the early days of the web), an iPad edition, more interviews and more on operational and implementation experiences. There were also calls for some graphics, better article tagging and less acronyms and a blog for reader feedback.
One reader just advised, ‘Stay relevant and focused on what you do best, Oil IT Journal is one of the very few magazines that most of my personnel read cover to cover every month. It does a great job and fulfils its mandate well.’ We are keeping the survey live for a few more weeks so you can still contribute to the debate on OilIT.com.
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