Collaboration is an everyday element of professional life. According to a recent research by PennEnergy, over 70% of oil and gas professionals believes collaboration is “important for driving revenue, cutting costs” and contributes to “the health and safety” of workers. Using salary statistics of the US Department of Labor, Microsoft and Accenture estimated that the industry loses out on about half a billion dollars annually due to shortcomings in collaboration technology alone.
Collaboration is an everyday element of professional life. According to a recent research by PennEnergy, over 70% of oil and gas professionals believes collaboration is “important for driving revenue, cutting costs” and contributes to “the health and safety” of workers. Using salary statistics of the US Department of Labor, Microsoft and Accenture estimated that the industry loses out on about half a billion dollars annually due to shortcomings in collaboration technology alone.
Collaboration based on visualization technology
Any solution for collaboration that involves visualization technology is inevitably going to involve IP technology. This new collaboration approach offers the following functionalities:
- Integration of a diverse number of hardware, software and networked sources simultaneously
- A Windows desktop environment
- Mouse and keyboard control of the display system. This includes resizing and moving source windows, as well as remotely accessing sources on the network
- Real-time data sharing. Users on the network can send data or share their desktop with the display system, while the system can retrieve networked desktops and display them as sources.
- Videoconferencing.
Case examples
The PennEnergy survey indicated that about half of the polled professionals think “they could save at least an hour every day” with “newer and more effective collaboration tools.” Important demonstrations of this point include a few cases of this newer technology making the difference in an oil and gas company’s workflow:
- BP linked their Aberdeen facility in Scotland to their offshore oil rig with a network of 43 projectors, each equipped with collaboration software.
- Shell has deployed similar technology across sites as remote as the Netherlands, Norway and Malaysia. They primarily use large-scale 3D display walls.
Again, returning to the PennEnergy survey, Jill Feblowitz, practice director at Energy Insight, says that “in the oil and gas industry, collaboration is a key strategy to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and promote collaborative working relationships among oilfield asset teams located in remote locations around the globe.”
