Perhaps more telling is that 61 percent of respondents said they spend at least one hour each working day searching for information and knowledge sources necessary for their jobs. With an estimated 65,000 engineering professionals in the global oil and gas industry today, this translates into a potential loss of almost 10 million people-hours a year among engineers alone, an average net annual loss of $485 million for the industry, calculated according to U.S. Department of Labor salary statistics.
"During this time of economic upheaval, when every dollar counts and effective decision-making is crucial, new technologies such as social media tools can help oil and gas industry professionals find information, collaborate and generally be more productive," said Craig Hodges, U.S. energy and chemicals industry solutions director at Microsoft. "In an environment with fewer workers and less resources, this is incremental productivity our industry can use in finding new reserves, improving execution of capital projects, driving new innovations and reducing costs."
Social Media: Available Now or Vision for the Future?
The survey pointed to one path companies can take to help maximize productivity and facilitate knowledge-sharing and capture. Specifically, 41.5 percent of those polled said they could save at least an hour every day by using these newer and more effective collaboration tools.
Surveyed professionals also revealed that advanced collaboration and information-sharing capabilities bring value not only in sharing enterprise knowledge but also in completing operational projects. For example, 74 percent said that these capabilities are very important in managing capital projects to drive down costs; 51 percent said they are very important in sourcing scarce technical skills needed to enhance revenues; and 50 percent saw these new technologies as very important to the sharing of health and safety advisories or experiences.
"Companies are dealing with several trends right now, not only the aging workforce walking out the door with decades of knowledge, but also experienced hires coming into their businesses who need to understand a new corporate culture," said Claire Markwardt, senior executive, Accenture's energy practice. "Companies have an opportunity to supplement their existing collaboration capabilities with newer tools such as podcasts and social networks to accelerate the sharing of knowledge, increase teaming and augment communication between their workforces in different regions."
While more than half the respondents favored adopting social media technologies to help shrink the productivity gap, only 37 percent of respondents think their companies are prepared or very prepared to facilitate enhanced sharing and capturing of the company's intellectual capital. When asked why, almost half (48 percent) said company management doesn't view these issues as a problem. And 44 percent laid responsibility for lack of readiness on older workers who do not typically use digital knowledge-sharing capabilities. Still others said that vital company information is locked on individual PCs or spreadsheets not available for easy sharing.
"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," said Jill Feblowitz, practice director at Energy Insights an IDC company. "Energy Insights believes that the momentum behind Web 2.0 will bring it to the oil and gas industry. Web 2.0 technologies can support the following industry requirements: connection with remote geographic locations, knowledge capture, knowledge access, informal knowledge sharing, and joint ventures and team projects."
Despite Economy, Workers Still Retiring and Capturing Knowledge Still Challenging
Survey respondents also confirmed that concern about capturing knowledge from experienced workers before they retire or leave the company is prevalent. As might be expected, more than half (53 percent) reported that aging workers are retiring in increasing numbers.
However, survey respondents stated that the tools primarily used to retain this knowledge and intellectual capital from retiring workers are largely older methods, such as electronic file shares (64 percent), databases or repositories (58 percent) and written documents/physical files (58 percent). In fact, almost a quarter of respondents reported exit interviews as the tool used most often to capture knowledge from these workers.
Respondents overwhelmingly said new collaboration technologies can help stem this flow of exiting knowledge. When asked which of the social media tools would be most beneficial for this task:
- 81 percent cited Internet portals
- 58 percent pointed to social networking sites
- 56 percent named video or photo sharing
- 44 percent cited blogs or mini-blogs
- 43 percent preferred wikis
Corporate Cultures Slow to Change
When asked how well their corporate cultures support the adoption of these new tools, only about one-third of respondents think their company cultures are well aligned with implementation of new social media technologies. Far more view their organizations as not proactive, not encouraging and/or opposed to the use of these information technology innovations as business tools.
