Analytics Magazine Analytics Magazine, March/April 2014 | Page 40

OI L F IEL D AN A LY T I C S Respondents said data warehousing and data management/integration technologies are among their top priorities for investment this year. Both technologies are important steps in laying the groundwork for broader use of analytics tools. 40 | data and analytics capabilities. The solution starts with creating a platform for analytics by consolidating and integrating data by type (exploration, development or production) over as broad a geographic area or portion of the company as possible. Next is to deploy analytics tools that can optimize the value of historical data in each of the three main categories, while laying groundwork for real-time and predictive tools that can holistically analyze the three main categories of data. Ovum primary research shows that E&P and oilfield services companies are taking up this challenge. In its 2013 ICT Enterprise Insights survey, Ovum interviewed more than 400 IT decisionmakers in E&P (among more than 6,500 across 17 industries). Asked about their priorities in information management, the respondents said data warehousing and data management/integration technologies are among their top priorities for investment this year. Both technologies are important steps in laying the groundwork for broader use of analytics tools. Important though it is, data integration should not be undertaken all at once. Depending on the degree of fragmentation of its existing data, an E&P company may face a complex challenge extracting all of this data, transforming it into a consistent format, and loading it into a new, unified database. Most enterprises will want to rely on an outside company – the analytics software vendor, a systems integrator or both – to do that, rather than build or hire for such skills internally. Pragmatism dictates tackling the problem in A N A LY T I C S - M A G A Z I N E . O R G W W W. I N F O R M S . O R G