Chevron’s Change Management Efforts Enhanced with IT Systems

There’s a great videocast floating around the Internet, courtesy of HP, by Chevron CTO Don Paul. He is the corporate officer responsible for Chevron’s three technology companies: Energy Technology, Information Technology and Technology Ventures. In this role, he coordinates their work to accelerate the development and integrated application of technology throughout the company’s worldwide business activities.

Paul’s podcast is about how companies the size of Chevron manage change. The energy industry is so big, and incorporates almost every part of business – from geology to accounting.—that Chevron must take a long view, and develop people.

Paul says as CTO of Chevron, that he is the ultimate integrator.

“The rate of growth of data is astronomical, and will grow faster as people deploy more sensors. For Chevron, it is now practical to add millions of sensors at a plant to collect data and put it into the system. Businesses evolve. We now use acoustic images to find drilling locations. It’s like CAT scans of the earth.”

So the issue becomes one of data management: what does Chevron do with the data it collects?

Paul believes that to get ready for the world of the future, we have to fix the data management paradigm, because the current system will fail under these pressures.

Paul believes we have to have standards, which make it possible to take on one of the key challenges for any organization dependent on digital data, which is data security or management. For Chevron, the future will be a hybrid of centralized management and distributed management.

We need to be able to evolve a system that will take advantage of the scale we have to make things efficient,” Paul says. At Chevron, he uses technology to take on challenges that could become opportunities or limitations. He believes that for his company, the challenges will be opportunities.

We understand and agree with Paul’s comments about the increasing complexity of data management and the need to manage data more efficiently. This is the main reason we decided to integrate our enterprise software into a single common database in 2001. Like Microsoft Office, this plug and play model allows for the highest efficiency and flexibility.

With the ability to address one EHS issue such as air emissions now, other issues like water, waste, or chemical management can be added later with out-of-the-box data integration. This provides high data integrity and a “single version of the truth” for all environmental data within an organization. It also gives the lowest cost of operation, because it eliminates the ongoing support required with multiple integration points.

One of our challenges at ESS is to continually evaluate how our software tools are managing the data and ensuring that we continually find ways to make the process more efficient for our customers.

Add comment April 5th, 2007

Supreme Court Decision Affirms EPA’s Responsibility to Regulate Carbon Dioxide

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision that the matter of regulating carbon dioxide emissions does fall to the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act is an example of how the issue of global warming has gone beyond political parties. According to an article in the Times, the Court, composed largely of conservative justices, was still able to produce a majority in favor of the science behind global warming and the need to do something about it. So it decided in favor of the states that wish greenhouse gasses to be regulated under the Act.

The EPA argued that it does not consider carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gasses pollutants, and thus doesn’t include them among the chemicals it regulates under the Clean Air Act. The Agency also feels that most greenhouse gas emissions are due to automobiles, and don’t make enough of a contribution to global warming to require regulation.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., along with Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr., expressed doubts that the group of states suing the EPA to be allowed to regulate greenhouse gas emissions could show that global climate change presented a sufficiently tangible and imminent danger that could be addressed best by regulating emissions from new cars and trucks.

Add comment April 5th, 2007