The Marketplace Interface
The Petroleum Lease Marketplace module is the second “marketplace” module of the Preliminary Specification. Like the Resource Marketplace module, which deals with the resources used in the development of oil and gas, the Petroleum Lease Marketplace emulates the marketplaces that exist for Petroleum & Natural Gas Leases, concessions, etc. and the associated activities involved around those “things.” What is helpful in understanding the capabilities that are attained by developing “marketplaces” in the Preliminary Specification is this quote from Frederick von Hayek.
The whole acts as one market, not because any of its members survey the whole field, but because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all. ...The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information passed on and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement. (Hayek 1945, pp. 526 - 527)
Prices for the bonus paid on acreage. The price asked by a producer for a working interest share in a property. These are the activities that occur in the marketplace everyday. What we are doing in the Petroleum Lease Marketplace is emulating the real marketplace to enable it to grow thicker and more robust. With market opportunities being dislocated sometimes by thousands of miles from interested parties, the ability for market participants to meet is limited. Even with the Internet the chance of finding someone is difficult. However, with a module like the Petroleum Lease Marketplace, you have a focused forum in which to deal with interested parties. At the same time you have the means in which to transact and manage the business, develop agreements, pay lease rentals etc. The Petroleum Lease Marketplace is a software environment that provides for the marketplaces emulation.
Critical to the success of this marketplace is the further division of labor and specialization. We have discussed earlier in the specification how the Lease Rental Administration could be handled on an industry wide basis by a service provider. Other roles may be able to be handled in a similar fashion in the Petroleum Lease Marketplace. With the development of this software module or marketplace emulator, would be the market supporting institutions that would bring in the efficiencies that would enhance the effectiveness of the marketplace. Providing assurances such as when a new P&NG Lease was acquired it was known that it would automatically have its lease rentals paid by your service provider.
There are many advantages to emulating the Petroleum Lease Marketplace in the Preliminary Specification. Just as there are advantages in the Resource and Financial Marketplace modules. Attempts at exchanges and other technical solutions have been tried before but they don’t have the “business” aspects that a “marketplace” has. What we are replicating is a business unit, not creating a technological solution. A significant difference to the users and producers who use the marketplace today, and will use the Petroleum Lease Marketplace module if it provides further value in their use of the actual marketplace. And with that I want to introduce the “Marketplace Interface” which uses the technology available from Open Wonderland. Here it is shown as an example of the ultimate collaborative interface.
(Please review the video below.)
We have detailed some of the interfaces that would be used by the suppliers and vendors in providing specific products and services to the oil and gas producers and Joint Operating Committees through the “Marketplace Interface” of the Petroleum Lease Marketplace. We note the Community of Independent Service Providers as they are called at People, Ideas & Objects, or Industrial Districts as Professor Langlois refers to the concept, is structurally different than in the Resource Marketplace. The focus of the work that is done in the “Marketplace Interface” is primarily administrative. Although the disruption in moving the majority of the work from the firm to the marketplace will involve innovative and creative processes, once the marketplace settles into a rhythm, the administrative level of change will slow. Much of the actual work that is conducted in the “Marketplace Interface” will be to support the transactions that are conducted by the producers in the marketplace environment.
The “Marketplace Interface” is not a source of innovation for the oil and gas producer. It is an area where the producer can focus on their core competitive advantage of their land and asset base. The administrative efficiencies and effectiveness are certainly part of that competitive advantage. I only raise this point to identify that there will be the dynamic nature of the marketplace for buying, selling, purchasing, bidding, acquiring, dealing, surrendering, leases and properties.
As a possible scenario, in the Marketplace Interface, we have a producer who is interested in determining what the market value for their interest in a small gas plant will generate. The average production is 100 barrels of oil equivalent per day from 50 wells, compression and dehydration. Through the “Marketplace Interface” the producer puts their 17.5% working interest in the property on the market for sale and is open to offers. The property is then highlighted in the property section of the “Marketplace Interface” where users can see that property was just posted for sale. It is also listed by zone and product category in the international markets databases. Soon offers are made and the property attracts a reasonable price. The seller deems the property is to be sold, none of the partners are able to match the best offer, and the property is sold. Immediately the administrative aspects of having the leases, agreements and partners recognize the sale agreement, and with the closing executed, these administrative tasks are done.
Or something along those lines. The point in this scenario is to briefly show how many of the attributes that we have been talking about will work together in the “Marketplace Interface.” The efficiencies of the marketplace in terms of having a ready market to buy and sell properties, leases and interests. And to have those transactions backed up by the transaction processing that is as complex as is necessary to close the most complex of purchase or sale agreements. This is how the innovative oil and gas producer will need to operate in the 21st century.
We have focused on the deliberate nature of developing the “Marketplace Interface” of the Petroleum Lease Marketplace of the Preliminary Specification. During the 1960's systems capabilities were limited and their applications were quite crude. Organizational developments were therefore constrained by the limitations in Information Technologies. The focus of systems development was the firm itself, and that focus was driven primarily by the compliance and governance requirements of firms (Accounting, Tax, Royalty, SEC etc). During this time, in oil and gas, the Joint Operating Committee was secondary to the demands of the compliance and governance frameworks of the firm. This systems thinking grew over a period of time in which it included several generations of people. Through this process the administration, oil and gas became more oriented to the compliance and governance frameworks of the firm and conversely more withdrawn from the seven frameworks of the JOC.
It is my opinion that the Preliminary Specification is not revolutionary in its move to the Joint Operating Committee, but evolutionary. Particularly from the point of view that we are moving towards the common-sense form of organization of the industry. Leaving this 1960’s “systems thinking” that is prevalent in today’s systems behind. This is what is necessary for the innovative producer to attain the speed of operations to compete in the 21st century oil and gas industry.
We also must contend with the concepts that originated in the minds of the software developers of SAP and Oracle which certainly were different then what have been stated in the Preliminary Specification. I believe that whatever their vision may have been, for oil and gas it is misguided as it does not recognize the unique nature of the business, the Joint Operating Committee. The unique nature of the industry had developed solutions to the problems and manner of operation. Those solutions consist of the JOC and the dependence on the market to provide for its needs. I can't think of an industry that comes close to the culture of the energy business.
Today the technologies involved in the Internet provide the industry with the opportunity to realize the fashion that it operates is unique, and deal with those anomalies in the best Interests of the industry. A dedicated software developer to build the systems that mirror the manner of the industries operations, the Joint Operating Committee and marketplaces, will enable greater innovation by relying on the marketplace and allowing the innovation to flow from wherever and whomever. This will not happen by chance. It is a deliberate act. And today that demands a software development capability and vision like that offered by People, Ideas & Objects and the Preliminary Specification.
Here again, I think the problem is one of conceptual imprecision. It is perfectly common, and often unobjectionable, to contrast a market and an organization, that is, to contrast the institution called a market and the institution called an organization (such as, notably, a firm). But the opposite of “organization” in the abstract sense is not “market” but disorganization. More helpfully, the opposite of conscious organization is unplanned or spontaneous coordination. In this sense the market-organization spectrum (and similar spectra one could imagine) are arguably orthogonal to the planned-spontaneous spectrum. One could well wonder, as I have (Langlois 1995), whether large organizations do not in fact grow far more as the unplanned consequence of many individual decisions than as the result of the conscious planning of any individual or small group of individuals. And it is certainly the case that, as Alfred Marshall understood, both firms and markets “are structures for promoting the growth of knowledge, and both require conscious organization” (Loasby 1990, p. 120).
Therefore development of the “Marketplace Interface,” is not a nice to have but a necessary for the innovative oil and gas industry. And the first technology I want to discuss will reside in the Oracle Fusion Middleware layer. It is in fact the “Marketplace Interface” that is made available through the open source Open Wonderland organization. Recall that there is only one “Marketplace Interface” that serves the three marketplace modules of Resource, Petroleum Lease and Financial Marketplace modules.
The origins of the Open Wonderland organization are of interest and pertinent to the discussion. Originally a Sun Microsystem research initiative the Project Wonderland development was open sourced and made available to the larger community. When Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems it deemed that the technology was of no commercial value to it or its customers and set the community to find a new home. Needless to say Open Wonderland has struggled since, without a major sponsor the technology has not advanced and the marketing of the technology is limited and difficult. There seems to be an inability of the community to relate the marketplace metaphor for the technology. That is what I think they need to make theirs the killer app in the commercial market space.
Open Wonderland is written in Java and therefore consistent with the Oracle Fusion Middleware server. Having this operate as a module in itself would not technically be an issue. The business risk of using the technology of a weak organization is mitigated by the fact that they have open sourced the code for the applications. If something should happen to Open Wonderland as an organization there is still an avenue to pursue with the code itself. It would be incumbent upon People, Ideas & Objects, when our revenue streams begin, to support initiatives such as Open Wonderland since we are in direct benefit of their technologies and their organization.
(Please review the video below.)
The “Marketplace Interface” is a place where anyone in the oil & gas or service industry is able to establish a market presence or create an avatar to collaborate with others within the industry. People, Ideas & Objects will enable these avatar’s to conduct business through the ERP service of the People, Ideas & Objects application modules and the Oracle Fusion Application modules. Interactions such as buying and selling oil and gas assets, purchasing field services, creating an AFE, making decisions within a Joint Operating Committee. Doing many of the things that can be done physically, only virtually through the use of the avatars that have been created and enabled in the “Marketplace Interface.”
Here’s why I think the “Marketplace Interface” is so critical to the innovative oil and gas producer. Phone calls can’t do it. That is to say they are usually, or preferably, with only two people. They can’t be documented and any business that arises from them has to be entered in other systems. They do have the benefit of spontaneity and are available anywhere. Meetings are difficult to schedule all the participants within a reasonable time frame, no spontaneity, no virtualization. However they are easily documented and business that arises from them need to be input into other systems. Meetings can be with any number of people, however the law of diminishing returns comes into play. There has to be a compromise in terms of these two mediums of collaborations. Keep the phone calls and the meetings and add the virtual collaborations from the “Marketplace Interface.”
The “Marketplace Interface” will provide the spontaneity of the phone call and the ability of people from far distances to meet up in no time. Documentation of the business can be comprehensive and include video of the simulation and copies of the documents. Any business that is generated during the meetings can be dealt with through the “Marketplace Interface” by selecting the appropriate ERP related option-command submenu. Productivity would be the result. Attendance at these virtual meetings could increase and overall travelling time would be substantially reduced. The follow-on business associated with meetings would be initiated during the meeting and things would get done. Not so much a fancy technology but a real productivity enhancing business tool.
(Please review the video below.)
The Preliminary Specification provides the oil and gas producer with the most profitable means of oil and gas operations. People, Ideas & Objects Revenue Model specifies the means in which investors can participate in these user defined software developments. Users are welcome to join me here. Together we can begin to meet the future demands for energy.