People, Ideas & Objects et al's Marshall Plan, Part II
In Part I of this series we touched briefly on the Preliminary Specification and the questions of “what” it was and “why” we were offering it. In Part II I’ll be detailing the answer to the question of “how” we are delivering the Preliminary Specification into the North American market. How is it developed, implemented into the producer firms and the associated infrastructure involved in the secondary industries and how will it operate once implemented?
Issue
There is a culture that exists in North American based producers of acceptance of the status quo failure. Nothing is ever the responsibility of the producers, who refuse to recognize they’re operating a primary industry, they’re always quick to point the finger at the most plausible, viable group for any of their failures. This has been effective in isolating and extracting them from the day to day of the business and their involvement in the business. It’s the OPECs, the government, their investors, bankers, the service industry and now even the consumers themselves who fall prey to their accusations. It’s an inability to critically accept the leadership role and responsibility that involves managing this primary industry for the purpose of profitable operations.
Today’s culture involves the bullying of others to do what bureaucrats deem is necessary to earn a reward of a few dollars sprinkled in those areas that producers are wholly dependent upon. Sitting on top of the revenues of the industry, revenues that represent the efforts of the producers but also the service industry and all other tertiary industries. Doling out what they feel are cash prizes to those that follow along with the plan and agenda. This would be acceptable if the plan and agenda was focused on achieving profitable operations for all concerned. It is the bureaucrats' plan to feed those who will blindly follow them into whatever direction they dictate. How else can you account for this bureaucratic obstinance which has also been represented in refusing to listen to their investors since 2015?
This culture has comprehensively failed in the shale era of oil and gas development. The service industry has been run through due to the lack of care and concern from the producers. The service industry is no longer capable of providing the means in which to extend the producer organizations with the geographical and technical extension of the producer organizations in terms of field operations. The comprehensive capacity of the service industry no longer exists due to the difficulties the producers placed at their doorstep. Much as the traditional market incentives of investors and bankers have fled the oil and gas producers. It is the same unfortunate case in the service industry. There is however a much larger difficulty due to the major differences between the producers and the service industry representatives. The service industry's only revenue stream is from the producers. Of which producers sliced the demand for their services to 25% of what it was prior to their difficulties. They then negotiated the prices of the service industry by bullying them to accept half the price or the producer would shift their work elsewhere. Leaving the service industry with a drop in revenues in the range of 87.5%. And to add insult to injury they did not pay them for this work for 18 months. Now they’re one of the producers viable scapegoats as to why there’ll be no response to the demand for more energy, it is the service industries lack of capacities and capabilities that is the producers primary target. Never any admission of responsibility or offer to deal with problems. The major difference for the investors and bankers of the service industry is that it is more severe than what producers experienced, it is a cyclical behavior throughout the producer population, it is systemic, cultural and most of all highly abusive of the service industry.
We touched on the issue of the service industry in Part I of this series. I only discuss this in more detail in Part II as it is the easiest for everyone to understand and relate to the damage that’s been done. It is the most tragic, unnecessary and difficult area of the industry that needs to be purposely rebuilt. It is also symbolic of all other aspects of the greater oil and gas economy outside of the bureaucrats, who assure me they’re fine, and thank you for asking. The entrepreneurial class, investors, bankers and those that have chosen to pursue careers in any discipline of oil and gas have also been betrayed by the producer bureaucrats' desire to fill their own pockets at all of their expense. Trust, faith and belief in what is said and done isn’t worth much coming from an oil and gas officer or director.
Therefore from a cultural perspective. From a leadership perspective. Who will lead the oil and gas industry out of the situation it finds itself in today? Will it be the current bureaucrat which we identify as these officers and directors of the producer firms? If we are looking to these people to solve the difficulties they’ve created and feign they don’t understand, then I can assure you that we will be disappointed and we will be betrayed. We will only have ourselves to blame if we do so. The current officers and directors of the producer firms will be needed to manage the producer firms in the interim until the rebuild is complete, then we can safely cast them to the ash heap of history.
Looking simply at the scope and scale of our domain of what we are proposing in the Preliminary Specification we are dealing with ERP systems, accounting and administration. This however does not preclude us from demanding that all aspects of the greater oil and gas economy must be involved with the further development and filling out of the overall detail that is the Preliminary Specification. It is the means in which all of these other areas can be restructured around the vision that is put forward and commence their organizations rebuilding on the basis of that vision. We are not, and can not bring forward any attribute of this failed legacy. The quickest route to reestablishing the trust and integrity where people will once again commit to oil and gas is through the elimination of those and their structures that caused this loss of trust. They can never be resurrected. They can never be compromised with. We must hold to this vision as the fastest method of rebuilding and the most integral method of eliminating them.
Our “Marshall Plans” Response
People, Ideas & Objects priority and focus is our user community. We began its development soon after the completion of the Preliminary Specification. During the first quarter of 2014 we identified the primary cost of quality, usable software is the development of a user community which demands significant time be expended in order to allow it to develop. The other difficulty is providing those who join with a viable and usable business model as a guide or vision in which to build from. Our user communities establishment in early 2014 has enabled them to assimilate the Preliminary Specification into their thinking. This is the value that will pay dividends in terms of the length of time necessary to deliver the first commercial release of our product. A value that is a comprehensive reduction in time to resurrect the North American oil and gas industry through quality, user driven software development. People, Ideas & Objects suggests to the bureaucrats fury, that it’s no longer enough to own the oil and gas asset, it’s also necessary to have access to the software that makes the oil and gas asset profitable. Any attempt to do so otherwise in a highly structured, sophisticated economy without the use of software is bureaucratic folly.
Upon initiation in March 2014 of the People, Ideas & Objects User Community Vision which guides the user community member and provides them with an understanding of their role in the development, implementation and operation of the ERP systems, accounting and administration of the North American oil and gas industry. This is not your grandfather's user community and is indeed a very powerful community endowed with the ability to meet the tasks and objectives of what we’ve identified in the Preliminary Specification and the issues and opportunities in oil and gas. The first was their Charter.
Our user community seeks to find the right solution for the most profitable means of oil and gas operations everywhere and always. We’ve now seen what happens when profits are ignored in the industry. What oil and gas is experiencing is unquestionably the most difficult issue they’ve ever faced. Our collaborations are not to build consensus or compromise. On the contrary, we have many issues to resolve and some of the most complex that have ever been approached. The resolution of issues lies at the point of conflict and contradiction. It’ll be our user community's job to find those conflicting attributes and contradictions, and resolve them to build the industry software for the next generation, to build the dynamic, innovative, accountable and profitable energy industry we now need in North America.
And these are the components of how their Charter is enabled to fulfill the vision of the Preliminary Specification and the needs of the industries.
- Only the user community is licensed to make changes to any of the underlying Intellectual Property of the Preliminary Specification and its derivative works.
- People, Ideas & Objects licensed developers will only look to the user community. We are blind, deaf and dumb to all others.
- Our user community has their own budget. They are independent business people. Not "blind sleep-walking agents of whomever will feed them."
It is therefore the user community member who has acquired through education, training and experience an intimate understanding of a specific domain of an oil and gas process that will be the key point of contact for anyone and everyone in the industry to have their input heard and included in the development of this software, its implementation and operation. It is the user community member who has with their license been granted the exclusive right to a specific process domain managements in a service provider organization they will own, operate and control. Bringing forward that which they have known for many years. It will be in the service providers where the administrative and accounting resources of the producers are reallocated in order for them to specialize on the basis of the specific process they manage. (Recall too this is how the producer's overhead is converted to a variable cost, based on production.) It will be there in the service provider that the implementation and operation of the software will be undertaken and managed on a day-to-day basis. All under the organization's principal being the user community member who has the exclusive ability to make the changes to the Intellectual Property the software is derived from, and on the basis of the issues and opportunities they see within their service provider organizations. They will also have the input from the industry and all other interested parties that may have changes or issues being raised. This is an effective change management mechanism that allows the software to change and evolve on the basis of the development of the oil and gas industry, the professions, regulations and competitive advantages of the service providers.
An example of a process domain for a service provider may be the calculation of the propane royalty obligations, and it may even be just a sub-process of this, with other service providers being responsible for other aspects. These will be done to ensure that the producers are paying the absolute minimum royalty necessary under the contract / royalty regulations. It will be the domain of the service providers to undertake the process management for the entire North American continents producer population of properties. In this case the calculation of propane royalties. Using specialization and the division of labor at high levels to ensure the efficiency and effectiveness of their process and quality of service is attained.
The competitive advantages of the service providers are comprehensive and provide real value to the dynamic, innovative, accountable and profitable oil and gas producer and industry. They include as a partial list: leadership, issue identification and resolution, decisions, creativity, collaboration, research, ideas, design, planning, thinking, negotiation, compromising, innovation, financing, conflict and contradictions, observation, reasoning, judgment, quality, automation and specialization and the division of labor. The service providers are granted exclusive rights over the process they operate. We do not use price as a competitive advantage as the means to do so is counter to the best interests of the producer's profitability. I am not of the opinion that a service provider and user community member who is focused on these competitive advantages and building value for the producer can then be concerned with a competitor jumping in to slash the price of the offering after doing none of the work of developing these ERP systems. The value proposition of People, Ideas & Objects Preliminary Specification is based on the holistic long term nature of the service provider reducing the producers costs through expanding their throughput by specialization, the division of labor and automation. Price competition does not have a role in enabling this work. It will be on the basis of competition between the service providers in the overall user community members that compete on the basis of a shared understanding of what is effective and innovative, not what is ripe territory to establish a competitive offering based on price.
Software such as People, Ideas & Objects will be delivering the explicit knowledge that is captured by the user community members during development, that which can be captured and used to be included in the software. That is only half the job however. The tacit knowledge is the more difficult aspect of what is done and that cannot be captured in any medium whatsoever. That is the knowledge that is contained within the population of the service providers as they are deployed in delivering their tacit knowledge with the explicit knowledge of the software. The user community members service provider is a software and service offering responsible for the implementation of the software into the producer firms and the operation on a day to day basis. The deployment of tacit and implicit knowledge has to be part of a comprehensive solution and what is structured to be delivered through People, Ideas & Objects Preliminary Specification, its user community and their service provider organizations.
Therefore, in terms of “how” the industry, the secondary and tertiary industries are able to rebuild in a manner that deals with the issues and opportunities that exist in 2022 this is what is proposed by People, Ideas & Objects. The Preliminary Specification is a comprehensive detailed plan that deals with the reality of the issues that began many decades ago and have manifested into absolute destruction. The loss of trust and integrity in the leadership that brought about this damage is absolute. And this needs to be addressed, ultimately abandoned and rebuilt in the vision of the Preliminary Specification that is uncompromising with what has brought us to this point. The focus of the greater oil and gas economy is therefore directed towards our user community in terms of this rebuilding. It is the greater oil and gas economy who will be using this vision as their base of understanding, and are the ones that will be able to take their focus, needs and desires and build them into this overall solution. Ours is the rational approach to resolve these issues. Organizing ourselves to resolve them has to be the logical first step in any solution.
Those interested in joining our user community are People, Ideas & Objects priority and focus. The Preliminary Specification, our user community and their service provider organizations provide for a dynamic, innovative, accountable and profitable oil and gas industry with the most profitable means of oil and gas operations, everywhere and always. Setting the foundation for profitable North American energy independence, everywhere and always. An industry where it will be less important who you know, but what you know and what you're capable of delivering, what the value proposition is that you’re offering? We know we can, and we know how to make money in this business. In addition, our software organizes the Intellectual Property of the exploration and production processes owned by the engineers and geologists. Enabling them to monetize their IP for a new oil & gas industry to begin with a means to be dynamic, innovative and performance oriented. Providing a new investment opportunity for those who see a bright future in the industry. A place where their administrative, accounting, exploration and production can be handled for the 21st century. People, Ideas & Objects. Anyone can contact me at 713-965-6720 in Houston or 587-735-2302 in Calgary, or email me here.