How to Use Social Networking in the Oil and Gas Industry
Feature Articles, Jan 18 2010 (Digital Energy Journal)
- Dr. Karen L. McGraw, Founder & CEO of Austin (Texas) based Cognitive Technologies, explains how oil and gas companies can make the most out of social networking
Oil and gas industry employees are already using collaborative and social networking tools, whether their respective organizations embrace them or not.
Dr. Karen L. McGraw, Founder & CEO of Austin (Texas) based Cognitive Technologies
These tools make sense for the energy sector in which organizations are highly dispersed—with some employees working in the U.S. and some in the Middle East or other regions; there are also employees at offshore wells and other remote locations.
Collaboration is extremely important in these situations to help improve and maintain high levels of employee engagement and retention and to help build cross-global relationships.
While 40 percent of oil and gas professionals believe company adoption of social media tools would boost productivity on the job, only one out of four were leveraging these new tools in 2009 to capture and share important information internally, according to a Microsoft Corp. and Accenture survey.
While many collaboration and networking tools exist, there are three that merit strong consideration by project teams: Microsoft SharePoint, Facebook, and LinkedIn. These can help create an environment conducive to informal learning, team collaboration, and information access and decision making.
But these benefits cannot be achieved by accident. It’s up to project managers to take these collaboration and social networking tools and mold them into a powerful project management function.
Team collaboration
The oil and gas industry requires the involvement of many different types of professionals—geologists, geophysicists, petrophysicists, reservoir engineers, and many others who are often called on to collaborate and make decisions that have high dollar impacts.
Researchers investigating how some of the world’s most productive scientists achieved great success have determined that measureable breakthroughs take place through simple, open, and honest conversations among risk-free collaboration.
This collaboration—the basis for bringing together the knowledge, experience and skills of multiple team members—requires effective team work.
Project teams in this sector are also tasked to work together on critical IT and other projects, yet the project staff may be pulled from a number of different locations, as we pointed out earlier.
Collaborative and social networking tools can help achieve both of these scenarios by helping to:
- Provide portals with easy access to collaborative work spaces.
- Improve the ability of team members to share with each other.
- Boost project and organizational collaboration.
- Build and deepen project team member relationships.
The idea is to organize sites around common concepts such as a Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, a Risk List, Action Items, and a Document Library.
Collaboration on document development becomes easier when drafts no longer need to be emailed to everyone, and when check-in/check-out features enable version control.
In addition, collaboration tools can encourage and deepen team relationships and networking. Since business “gets done” through relationships, this as a very positive development.
By either adding team member profiles to SharePoint via the My Site feature, or by encouraging team members to use LinkedIn and Facebook, which both put user profiles center stage, people can easily share common interests with others.
Learning through crowdsourcing
Informal learning (which takes place outside of a classroom) represents approximately 75 percent of actual corporate learning and training. The most valuable learning often takes place serendipitously, by random chance.
Informal learning describes a lifelong process whereby individuals acquire attitudes, values, skills, and knowledge from daily experience and the educational influences and resources in his or her environment, from family and neighbours, from work and play, from the market place, the library and the mass media.
Opportunities for this to happen have increased substantially since the dawn of online social networking. More and more information is being gained through this type of crowd sourcing, making it a profoundly powerful way to learn.
Unlike formal classroom training, informal learning puts the individual learner in charge, enabling him or her to ask, “What do I need to learn today, this week, or before I can complete an assigned project task?”
Project teams can use collaborative and social networking tools to support this kind of informal learning by allowing team members to:
- Find and connect with an available expert who can answer that “very important” question.
- Read an internal white paper or article available in the corporate knowledgebase or project team site.
- Download a template that guides them through a new process.
- Attend a live or recorded internal webinar on a topic critical to their success.
- Complete a single module of an online training course that addresses the specific knowledge or skill they need.
Project documentation
One of the most often-used sections of Microsoft Sharepoint and Microsoft Project Server is the Repository of project documentation.
This large-scale library is organized by major topics, as well as by project phases. The tool suite enables project team members to quickly filter documents to drill down and zero in on exactly what is needed.Or, of course, project team members can use the search box and enter key words to find the target document.
For smaller-scale projects (this specific tool suite houses 45 project plans representing approximately 500,000 tasks), Facebook and LinkedIn can create informal repository environments as well.
Decision making
One of the most potent reasons to embrace collaborative tools such as SharePoint is to improve information access and availability in order to enhance decision making and management of project risks.
The decision making process takes place in a “decision environment.” An ideal decision environment would provide all possible information, and all of this information would be accurate.
In reality, however, information is constrained because the time and effort to gain it is usually limited.
So the major challenge of decision making is uncertainty. In other words, we can almost never have all information needed to make a decision with certainty, so most decisions involve an undeniable amount of risk.
According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), poor information access is often reported a primary cause of technology project failure. Providing improved information access for all team members enables faster use of critical information and, thus, enhanced decision making and project management.
Recent research indicates that people typically waste 15-30 minutes daily searching for information. This adds up fast for the typical project team. In fact, IDC research suggests that organizations waste up to $14,000 per knowledge worker each year because those workers are unable to find information, forcing them to resort to recreating existing data.
One way to improve information access is to simplify workflows by standardizing and streamlining project processes. This means that people no longer have to remember what to do within a process; instead, they are alerted when a process requires their response.
For instance, Microsoft Office Professional 2007, in conjunction with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007, includes built-in workflow services for tracking feedback and approval.
Another way to improve information access is to organize the collaborative site around project phases, processes, and/or repositories to make it easier for team members to quickly find the information they need.
SharePoint also supports dashboards and KPIs, which compile critical information that project managers and team leads can use to determine progress and status and to make decisions.
About the Author: Dr. Karen L. McGraw is founder and CEO of Cognitive Technologies, a consulting firm specializing in project management, collaborative processes, and organizational effectiveness. Learn more at http://www.cognitive-technologies.com