Mais Taha

Today digital technologies driven by data science hold immense potential in enhancing the oil and gas industry performance. Value realisation governance, and adoption focus, are key factors in ensuring sustainable digital investment strategies. NOC established a digital program in 2019 to support the growth of the operations and to optimize resources and cost, during a period where the assets was doubling in size. Key regional challenges and opportunities for further innovation were evident in the following areas: Vast reservoirs and sustainable production methods, maintaining aging infrastructure and legacy wells and facilities, and balancing sustainability and cost efficiency.  The digitalization journey started with uncertainty on the associated value.

This framework is a structured approach that helps the organization assess, prioritize, and measure the impact of digital initiatives. The importance of it, is to ensure alignment with business goals, maximize value, and provide a systematic way to evaluate digital projects.

Key transformation areas were identified as main value streams of the program driven by the following transformation needs: Occupational and process safety ,Sustainability ,Harmonizing legacy with innovation, and Managing complex operations.  

The transformational and cost efficiency drivers were addressed through several use cases covering different value streams including

• Sustainability/ Cost efficiency:  Offshore logistics optimization  


• Production:  Production Optimisation tool  , Data Analytics tool


• Reservoir and Geoscience  : Pressure conditioning recommendations tool


• Reliability / process safety:  Health Check for rotating Equipment ( predective maintainance)


• Maintenance Planning and scheduling : Offshore Activity Optimisation tool  t

The key components of the value framework are:  

• Business objective alignment through creating a predefined checklist  


• Value levers predefinition to navigate a list of value levers enabling the business to find the dimension of value matching their business case  


• Prioritization and KPI driven decision-making framework through value realization tree  


• Assumption registers to create a common understanding of all the assumptions made while defining the business case 

Finally, this Framework with estimated value contributed to a 15% increase in digital program value.  It was driven by challenges including precise methods of measuring value leading to underestimation. lack of data driven decision impeding focus on investment in high value digital UCs. Lack of baseline capabilities of business entities. 
The Best practices that were captured from this project include harnessing the potential of cross functional collaboration. The digital team is providing value consultation as a service to business entities. This effort is aiding in data driven validation of value to demonstrate the value case. Finally, like all frameworks there is room for refining the framework and enriching it further.