Driving Digital Transformation in Oil and Gas – Position Paper

Exploiting hyper-connectivity for optimized performance.

Upstream, midstream and downstream – digital transformation has a direct impact on every area of the oil and gas industry. Digital innovation does require investment, and ideally the cost of transformation can be covered to a large extent through savings made in traditional IT systems and services.

We are already witnessing a significant shift in attitudes to new technology practice in oil and gas. A large proportion of oil and gas companies in the US, for example, are already embracing cloud as a means of reducing cost and increasing agility. Some are even looking to public cloud services, something that would have been inconceivable, even five years ago.

We are also seeing significant changes in the ways that people expect to work. Oil and gas companies have always relied on extended networks of employees and sub-contractors – often working in extreme conditions. We now need to respond to opportunities to increase field-force performance through timely mobile access to data though robust, secure and affordable devices.

Industry 4.0 is driving significant change in manufacturing. It is inevitably set for positive impact in oil and gas too. The way in which we exploit the information flows which overlay every aspect of the industry, will ultimately determine the way in which we build a better future for it.

In this short paper, Atos looks at the areas in which digital transformation promises the greatest short and mid-term benefit for oil and gas companies and at how best to optimize existing IT management practices to help pay for it.