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Strategy & Consulting

Free your data to grow your business with OSDU™ Data Platform

September 15, 2021

3-MINUTE READ

In brief

  • With the OSDU(™) Data Platform, oil and gas companies can now overcome their legacy data challenges.
  • The OSDU Data Platform has the potential to dramatically improve application interoperability, accelerate workflows and drive operational efficiencies.
  • The decision to adopt the OSDU Data Platform cannot, however, be made lightly. Several factors need to be considered during the planning phase.
  • Accenture shares five actions companies can take to embrace the OSDU Data Platform for a smooth transition and be among the first to reap the benefits.

A core requirement for successful digital transformation in the exploration and production (E&P) sector is a robust, reliable data foundation—one that enables users to access, store, share and manage data across the enterprise. Upstream companies understand the benefit such a platform might deliver. Yet, their efforts to rein in their data complexity have historically been stymied by disparate data sources, applications and proprietary systems that trap data in silos.

That’s about to change.

A new kind of data platform enters the scene

The Open Group OSDU(™) Forum has designed a way for oil and gas companies to overcome their legacy data challenges. Comprising a set of services and workflows—and expressly designed for E&P data domains—the OSDU Data Platform enables operators to store all subsurface, wells and surface, and new energy data into a single reference data platform. The open-source, cloud-based and technology-agnostic data platform solves the upstream energy industry's data structure, storage and access challenges in several ways including:

  • Contextualizing data in a single system of record. That means data that has been historically siloed is readily available for analytics, advanced computing and digital transformation.
  • Lowering data storage costs by eliminating data duplication.
  • Increasing the pace of innovation by removing data silos and proprietary data formats. Application developers have easy access to usable data, irrespective of its source, enabling them to provide better solutions to solve operators’ problems.

In these ways, the platform has the potential to dramatically improve application interoperability, accelerate workflows and drive operational efficiencies—all while delivering meaningful insights that inform better, faster decision making.

The OSDU Data Platform has the potential to unlock real value with the following:

1. Direct infrastructure cost savings

Driven by data storage efficiencies and duplication avoidance.

2. Application and data management efficiencies

Arise when data across domains can be stitched together and managed in an industrialized way.

3. New operational workflows and a closed loop

Eliminate mapping and modeling redundancies, and also enable operators to quickly respond to market signals and take actions to adjust production.

Key considerations

The decision to adopt the OSDU Data Platform as a system of record cannot be made lightly. Several factors must be considered during the planning phase:

  • Existing infrastructure investments.
  • The maturity of the OSDU Data Platform.
  • Vendor “lock-in.”

Our analysis shows operators can achieve 5 to 15 percentage points increase in return on capital employed (ROCE).

Make the move

Oil and gas companies looking to embrace the OSDU Data Platform can ensure a smoother transition by taking five actions:

Assess

the current state of data in the organization, user requirements and business goals to determine the organization’s readiness for the move.

Imagine

a new data future and set a vision for what they want to achieve. The strategy for business growth should dictate the strategy for data utilization.

Plan

for the migration to the OSDU Data Platform and establish an integrated, end-to-end environment that fully empowers and leverages the new platform's capabilities.

Select

ecosystem partners wisely when building out the OSDU Data Platform's application and integration layers.

Initiate

the migration to the OSDU Data Platform within a single domain, evaluate progress and expand from there.

Liberate innovation by liberating data

Energy companies have long contended with data silos that limited their abilities to generate insights, develop innovations and make decisions that support business growth and business resilience. The OSDU Data Platform has the potential to eliminate the silo-induced challenges associated with data access, contextualization, standardization and interoperability. The potential value of this new industry-standard data platform is enormous. Those that make their moves now will be among the first to reap the benefits.

About the Authors

Emma Wild

Managing Director – Strategy & Consulting, Energy

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