Abstract:

All companies desire some form of Knowledge Management to maximise their firm’s potential. Data Analytics is a statistically based approach to interpreting and managing data. Companies in the Oil and Gas (O&G) industry are no different and consider Big Data Analytics (BDA) as one of their IT initiatives, as it will have positive impacts in different aspects of their organisation. While others are still not implementing BDA, some organisation’s BDA capabilities are not yet mature, and as large volumes of data are being acquired every day, organisations experience difficulties in capturing and sharing data. This paper discusses BDA’s different stages of maturity, identifying key technologies and future trends of BDA to provide fast accurate information to business. This is significant as two thirds of professionals believe BDA is key to having better business as it can continuously improve performance and processes by 8% - 30%. However only 13% of businesses stated their big data capabilities were mature. Moreover, as organisations move toward digital transformation, it is vital to know the views and opinions of employees in the O&G industry that have experienced the partial/full potential and challenges of BDA so that organisations can improve their resources and influence others. This paper consists of a literature review, interviews and qualitative analysis using a qualitative research approach for identifying and analysing related studies in the area of BDA. A collection of relevant articles from a variety of case studies, journals, white papers, newspaper articles, and many more, were reviewed. Additionally, interviews were conducted with people in the O&G industry from different countries and companies. Lastly, NVivo software was used for qualitative analysis of both the literature review as well as the interviews. All these approaches helped answer and explain the aims of this paper. In the end the outcome is a framework for O&G industry for their journey to be a data-driven organisation. In addition, interviews of employees help enlighten them to implement initiatives for business improvement.