People, Ideas & Objects Response to a Request for Proposal, Part V

 Intellectual Property

People, Ideas & Objects are establishing the need to rebuild the oil & gas industry and producer firms as a result of the damage and destruction that has been caused by officers and directors of the producers. Their “muddle along” strategy has instilled a “do nothing” culture that provides a status quo existence that has not and will never show any capacity to change. Even the event of 2015 and all subsequent years in which investors have refused to participate further in the industry has not prompted a response or action. Where does the motivation arise from this environment in order to efficiently and effectively conduct this rebuild? Oil & gas is one of the most advanced science and technologically based industries. One that demands innovation and iterative development of those sciences in order to ensure adequate reserves and production is provided by a dynamic, innovative, accountable and profitable oil & gas and service industry. And to ensure that it always meets the conflicting objective of ensuring consumers are provided with abundant, long term supplies of reliable and affordable oil & gas. 

The importance of Intellectual Property in the oil & gas industry is it will organize innovation. The most productive innovation is when it’s organized under a structure that provides for the market to focus on its development. The North American marketplace established IP centuries ago and we have reaped its benefits. The United States included copyright in its Constitution. Copyright has to be published in order to be earned. Exposing it to the marketplace of ideas where it can be built upon and enhanced by others. It reduces the “me-too” phenomenon that the oil & gas bureaucrats have created and benefited from in order to generate price competition in the service industry, elsewhere and to ensure everyone was rendered “blind sleepwalking agents of whomever would feed them.” Is this the method that an innovative industry is built upon? With bureaucrats sitting on top of the primary industry of oil & gas and using its revenues to endow their favors with the rewards of a penny or two here and there? 

The organizational structure of the new oil and gas industry People, Ideas & Objects et al will be building has Intellectual Property and innovation structured and based on the laws of the land. It will be these laws that define what innovation is undertaken and what is not. The violation of another's copyright or other IP is not allowable under the law so there would be no violators. A self policing mechanism reducing the overall costs of unnecessary duplication of innovation in the industry. Focusing the energy and resources on the development of profitable new products and services. Providing the incentive and motivation for those with the ideas to do the subsequent hard work of making those developments. Fully protected from the IP poaching that’s occurred so often and actively sponsored by the producers officers and directors and which is culturally ingrained in oil & gas today. Not just for today, but for always and everywhere. 

These copyrighted publications also enable an understanding of how things are done. Providing the means of which to build upon that understanding with additional innovations. Intellectual Property therefore provides us with a strong legal structure that encourages innovation, eliminates the costly redundancy of duplication of efforts, educates and provides the necessary legal protection to enable the motivation for the individual to do the difficult and challenging work we can all agree is the foundation of the industry. This applies across the greater oil and gas economic structure which includes all of the secondary and tertiary industries. The 21st century will be known for the leverage of Intellectual Property. Much as last century has leveraged mechanical effort. For officers and directors to be avoiding this or attempting to opt out is foolhardy in the extreme.

What is the motivation for people to develop their “ideas?” Are they not, just as the bureaucrats, in it for themselves and looking to siphon off what they can from the industry? Self interest is a part of every human endeavor. It comes down to whether or not it builds value. Self interested officers and directors have been well compensated while the industry has been destroyed. A contrast due to the fact they’ve not been motivated by the discovery of ways in which they can build value. Intellectual Property is therefore not only a structural organizational component that can enable the means to control the innovation process throughout the industry. The motivation behind the participants is purely from the point of view of building value through the establishment of incremental profitability, reduction of cost, enhanced production deliverability or the expansion of reserves. It is the law, and most importantly of all, proven. The reason the United States dominates in the manner that it does is due to the fact the Intellectual Property laws provide the motivational and organizational principles of how their economy and society operate. It assumes people are Intelligent beings, not serfs like the bureaucrats. It is productive, constructive, focused on generating value and is an overall benefit to society. Otherwise why would individuals do the hard work that’s necessary? By bureaucratic command? As a science and technology business, that is refuted to be second only to the space industry in terms of complexity. What has and what have these bureaucracies been doing under their business model?

Difficult work needs to be undertaken in a complex science and technology based industry in a 21st century business environment. Oil & gas is a critical necessity for the health and prosperity of our economy and way of life. One in which the environment and organizations we are presented with today can be assessed as wholly inadequate to meet those needs both today and the future. And what is potentially more difficult is they’ve shown no propensity to even recognize any of its issues or the need to make any changes. There is a need for significant development in all aspects of the greater oil & gas economy during this rebuilding period. A method of organization will be the first element necessary for a solution. However we have to address the issue of how that organization is formed and the subsequent pieces are put in place. The need to understand “how” those that are involved in this rebuilding will be motivated to do this hard work and where they can fit in is addressed in the Preliminary Specification. This is accomplished through the adoption of Intellectual Property as an organization construct that is defined and supported by the software and services People Ideas & Objects et al propose in this response to an RFP.

People, Ideas & Objects, our user community and their service provider organizations focus on providing all North American oil & gas producers with Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas. Including the startup, small and junior oil & gas producers to ensure they’re provided with the full capacities and capabilities of the Preliminary Specification. This is due to the critical role and nature of their existence in terms of their dynamism and innovativeness. Currently we have a market in oil & gas where the officers and directors point to the startup to junior producers as causing the difficulties we’ve seen in the industry. In fact they may have become the officers and directors most recent, viable scapegoat! Our focus is appropriate, and we’re able to ensure these producers are able to enter the industry with far less barriers to entry by establishing all producers with the means to generate a second source of permanent revenues from day one. A ready market where the demand for earth science and engineering resources will be made available through the Preliminary Specifications Work Order, Resource Marketplace, Research & Capabilities and Knowledge & Learning modules. Providing them with the cash necessary to pay their mortgage, their Internet, to work from home and skip past the dog food aisle for their families nutrition. Introducing them and their experience, skills, knowledge, and ideas that form their capabilities to the broader oil & gas marketplace. We also eliminate that impossible wall of never ending overhead costs that consumed investors dollars year after year as the base of fixed overhead of the small to junior producer. Which is and has been the cause of their demise today. It didn’t matter how good their technical skills were, that’s not what determined their success or failure as a startup oil & gas producer, it was if they could get past that wall of base overhead costs. 

Officers and directors have known the Preliminary Specification establishes a strong foundation for which the Intellectual Property of individuals within the industry. This value becomes available to those original authors, innovators and entrepreneurs which is in turn marketed to the oil & gas producer firms whose distinct competitive advantages include the coordination of the markets earth science and engineering capabilities and their land & asset base. This is provided through the Preliminary Specifications Resource Marketplace, Research & Capabilities and Knowledge & Learning modules that were published in final form in August 2012. From the Resource Marketplace module I summarized the point as.

Another key point is the tearing down of the basis of Intellectual Property (IP). An industry such as oil & gas which is based on its earth science and engineering needs. After all, it is a business based on science. If we are to expand the capabilities in science and innovation in the industry. We are going to need to solve many very difficult problems. And as we progress, the volume of ideas needed will be an order of magnitude of what is required today. These problems cannot be solved in an environment where there is no upside for the individuals to solve them. Addressing the motivation to solve these problems and enabling the people to earn the rights to the Intellectual Property within the People, Ideas & Objects application modules is the first step in making the necessary industry wide changes. This therefore will turn the oil & gas industry into a far more dynamic business.

With the oil & gas industry fundamentally destroyed as it is, its IP is also in disarray. The capabilities and capacities that are derived from it are deteriorating as we speak. Making this an IP gold rush in the industry, to save it from the bureaucrats. However, check your employment contracts they may have clauses that state while working for them all of yours is all of theirs. Consolidated producers' difficulty is that none of this is published and the act of publishing is how the copyright is earned. Patents and trademarks are defensive, in that they protect what is known of your IP at a point in time. Copyright is offensive and allows expansion of one's Intellectual Property through the creation of derivative works. Copyright does not secure for you the rights to an idea. It only provides you with the monopoly rights to the expression of that idea. Implying it must be pursued and maintained much in the manner that I do here. 

The point of individuals earning the Intellectual Property rights is of particular interest in an industry that has its earth science and engineering capabilities, and land and asset base as its distinct competitive advantage. These seem diametrically opposed in terms of how they would function. What People, Ideas & Objects are suggesting is that there is no need and no benefit in having the producer firms own any of the Intellectual Property that supports “what, how and why” the industry operates. We need to address the motivation of how the industry progresses, how science and technology progresses innovatively and quickly. And address why this hasn’t been the case. 

This Intellectual Property section of our RFP Response is ripe with conflict and contradiction. We stated earlier that the science and technology of shale was the most advanced, yet belittle the development of it over the past years. The contradiction is that I’m only suggesting oil & gas producers are in a static state. The development and implementation of shale technology would have been introduced decades earlier if the producers were able to keep up with the progress that was being made in the service industry. It is there, in the service industry where all the innovation and development has occurred. There is no benefit in a producer owning any IP on a drill bit. And we are extending the deployment of IP more broadly to the sciences of geology and engineering. What have been the bottlenecks to the further development of the industry these past many decades. 

Business is changing quickly. Intels dominance in the market is now a constraint that is causing them to lag the market in consequential ways. As the dominant manufacturer of processors, theirs has been deemed a redundant business model. The business value is no longer in the manufacture of processors, it's in the design of them. Contract manufacturing is a commodity business where others are finding profits and opportunities in that area where Intel can not compete. In terms of design being the value, that is now the case and people should read the summary of Ampere Computing’s Leadership Team that now has one of the most powerful processors available. Oracle (a major shareholder) has declared they’re moving their cloud offering to Ampere processors, which Oracle’s Cloud is offering today. 

This is the new business world and there are new business models. It comes down to one word, the individual. To organize society today, with its global reach, can no longer be done in a spontaneous manner. There is no serendipity when individual A meets individual B 1,000 miles away on the Internet through software providing them the means to conduct their business. Software defines and supports this style of organization. Without People, Ideas & Objects none of this oil & gas vision will come about by sitting and waiting for the phone to ring. At least it hasn’t happened yet.

The question also needs to be asked: why is it that Apple continues to innovate consistently? Although their products are more costly, they earn in excess of 80% of the profits of the mobile phone industry, they bring incremental value to their customers through the innovativeness they provide. They too rely on Intellectual Property as the basis of their value. They in fact consider themselves a software company that sells hardware in order to bring about that customer value. Again, software defines and supports their organization. Who would run a company that sources their handful of products from a number of countries that total in excess of 3.5 billion in population? And then have the gall to snap their fingers and say “now innovate.” It doesn’t happen without software.

For producers to be doubling and tripling down on their failed vision is the method chosen to resolve the oil & gas industry and producer issues by the current officers and directors. Raising the viable scapegoat that it's the small producers who are overproducing in order to meet their bank payments causing the disaster in the industry today. When officers and directors raise this argument we see the source of their own future demise. For them to admit the overproduction issue is attributable to their own actions would never cross their minds. Everything is always someone else's fault. Should they be successful in implementing SAP or other means to secure their method of organization and management this will most certainly continue.

We’ve defined our alternative vision in the Preliminary Specification and would note that it’s in stark contrast to the clean energy vision that producers and SAP are attempting to transition to. Disintermediation is best defined as the removal of the bureaucracy and red tape that is rendered redundant through the use of the Internet. Although the world is unaware of “how” and “what” the producers current consolidation driven vision will operate as, or any details, we can only speculate as to why it’s being done when all other industries are, and not by choice, finding efficiency in the decentralized methods of organization and disintermediation through technology. People, Ideas & Objects have repeatedly stated the fact that each boe provides 10 to 25 thousand man hours of equivalent labor, or 28 to 71 times the entire global population. Officers and directors capitulation of shale resources for clean energy should be seen as irresponsible when we understand that it’s the world's most powerful economy that is the largest consumer of energy. Why aren’t the officers and directors seeking to make shale profitable? 

Due to the demands for earth science and engineering resources in the near future. We’ve discussed how specialization and the division of labor are being used in the Preliminary Specification to deal with these associated resource demand issues. Conceptually we have implemented the pooling concept where the ability to have the Joint Operating Committee assigned with the available technical resources of each of the producer firms would be how the property was managed from an earth science and engineering perspective. The pooling concept being the replacement of the operator role. Establishing the second source of revenue for the producer and its supporting administrative infrastructure in the Preliminary Specification. We have also implemented the necessary governance model to support these resources with the appropriate organizational structure to ensure effective operations across the producer and each of their Joint Operating Committees. 

Two other interesting aspects of Intellectual Property are first, what’s known as the safe harbor provisions. Why don't producers turn around and launch a lawsuit against these copyright holders? This would be an unfortunate world where “big” ruled the earth and we serfs would be the drones who were forced to cooperate with their every command. The safe harbor provision states that you can not launch a lawsuit against the copyright holder. Secondly, the division of tacit and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge can not possibly be captured or written down. Only explicit knowledge can. Therefore it is up to people to take the explicit knowledge they have and apply their tacit knowledge as a service to support their IP and generate their value. These are as important as the IP itself. Just as People, Ideas & Objects user communities service provider organizations deliver our software and their tacit knowledge to the producer firms. 

People, Ideas & Objects Response to a Request for Proposal, Part IV

Specialization & the Division of Labor

Since 1776 the only basis of increased value generation is the expanded definition and use of specialization and the division of labor. Adam Smith proved in his research that reorganizing a pin factory around specialization and the division of labor between the individual workers, augmented through proficiency, automation and mechanical advantage, the output of the factory increased 240 fold. Today the inverse of this is true. Software and most particularly ERP software has sealed organizations in a definition that is unchangeable through any means other than changing the software process definition. This aids the status quo configuration of producers when they don’t sponsor or initiate any change in the ERP software that they use. Choosing instead to focus on engineering tasks such as cost cutting in an attempt to generate business value. If we are to meet the consumer's demands for energy in the 21st century it will be a result of an “all of the above” energy strategy. For the next several generations the largest component of the energy makeup will be oil & gas. Therefore to deal with these issues and opportunities demands that we increase the throughput of the industry substantially in order to meet the increasing demands of the North American marketplace. 

It is therefore necessary to ensure that we proceed from this point forward with the defined capability and capacity to enhance the ERP software used in North American oil & gas. And to do so in order to facilitate an increased level of specialization and division of labor that is iterative and constantly evolving. People, Ideas & Objects provide for this and are configured specifically to ensure that this is the case. Our business model is dependent on change. We generate revenues on the basis of the software development changes initiated by our user communities interactions with industry. Our user community will be available everywhere and always on a part-time basis to work with our developers to make the changes they’ve identified while working in their service provider operations. These service providers will be configured to deliver the explicit knowledge that's captured in our software and the tacit knowledge provided of their services. Our user community members are therefore on the ground in the industry on a day to day basis in the administration and accounting of the producer firms. They are the exclusive, licensed individuals that are the only group authorized to make changes to the underlying Intellectual Property of the software. Our developers are aware of no one else in terms of who provides their input. In other words our user community members have the power necessary to ensure that the processes they manage provide for the most profitable means of oil & gas operations everywhere and always. User community members are the only individuals that own and operate a service provider. If anyone in industry wants to know who they need to have their issue resolved, they’ll only need to engage the pertinent user community member. Who do they call today, or at SAP if our suspicions of the officers and directors actions are correct and they’re in the process of selecting their solution?

The advantages that People, Ideas & Objects Preliminary Specification brings for all producers is significant. Ours is a solution that is to be used by all of the producers in the North American industry. Whether that is Exxon or the producer firm that conceptually began at the breakfast table this morning. This also applies to any and all other types of secondary and tertiary industry firms involved in the greater oil & gas economy, no matter their size. However, in the categories of the junior and startup oil & gas producers, the advantages we provide put their organizations in the driver's seat in terms of how they’ll prosper and grow. They’ll have distinct competitive advantages over the methods of organization provided under today’s business model. These are brought about through the reorganization of the administrative and accounting resources of the producer firms into our user communities service provider organizations. And the implementation of our Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas service provided by them. 

The producer organization that we define and support in the Preliminary Specification set out to employ and deploy much higher levels of specialization and division of labor. We feel the overhead costs of the producers demand these be dealt with by making these organizations more efficient through the application of an advanced, and continually advancing, specialization and division of labor. We also turn their overhead costs from a fixed, producer based capacity and capability, into a variable, industry based capacity and capability, their variable behavior being based on a Joint Operating Committees ability to produce profitable production. One of the reasons for the high overhead costs of each producer (up to 20% of revenues, not the 1 to 6% reported on financial statements) is that all of their capacities and capabilities are replicated within each producer firm in an unshared and unshareable form. Today these accounting and administrative capabilities and capacities are purpose built within each producer organization to meet the demands of the various stakeholders, tax and regulatory requirements and it is these high overhead costs that are the secondary cause of the lack of profitability throughout oil & gas. Overhead costs do not form any part of a producer's distinct competitive advantage.

What the Preliminary Specification defines and supports is a reallocation of the producers administrative and accounting resources into the individual service providers who are headed by one of People, Ideas & Objects user community members. Our user community and their service providers are independent businesses that are specialized on one administrative or accounting process and conduct that process on behalf of the entire industry as their client base. Whereas if that Joint Operating Committee was producing that month, under our decentralized production models price maker strategy, we can reasonably assume it is therefore profitable. Upon production the processes that are specifically administered by each of the service providers will be invoked through our task and transfer network, processes undertaken and their associated billings for each process will be charged directly to their Joint Operating Committees. If it’s not profitable then the property would be shut-in and none of the service providers would receive any data from our task and transfer network and therefore no processes will be conducted and subsequently no service provider billings will be rendered. The shut-in property does not incur a profit or a loss, but a null operation. In either scenario overhead costs are covered in the current period through either profitable operations or the fact the cost behavior is variable under the Preliminary Specification, and as a result not incurred. 

There are many benefits for producers to begin their operations in this manner. First they will reach their optimum profitability when losses are no longer diluting profitable properties. Whether that is at 25% or at 100% of the producer's capacity. When all costs are variable, production will be profitable at any volume of their production profile. This will preserve their oil & gas reserves for a time when they can be produced profitably. Those reserves will no longer have to carry the incremental costs of the losses that would otherwise have been incurred if they continued to produce unprofitably. Keeping the commodity as reserves can be seen as an affordable means of storage where the subsequent costs of production and storage are zero. The commodity markets will find their marginal price when unprofitable production is removed from the marketplace. Increasing the value of all the producers' production by realizing the marginal price across their production profile. Producer officers and directors assert this is collusion. If making independent business decisions based on detailed actual, factual, standard and objective accounting information that is determining profitability is collusion, it is no wonder producers are incapable of profitability? 

During 2017 the officers and directors realized their collusion claims were moot; they stated unequivocally that they could never shut-in any production, it would cause the formation to “fold over on itself” or other specious arguments. That is until they ran the oil price down to negative $40 in April of 2020. The refineries had to tell them they wouldn’t take anymore, forcing production to be shut-in. Upon resumption of production the formations reflected there was no damage anywhere. These are just some of the many reasons for the Preliminary Specifications implementation. Oil & gas commodities are price makers, not the price takers the officers and directors assumed they were for all these decades. One critical aspect of a price maker is that they only bring on new production when it’s profitable. The method we’ve developed is detailed further in the Preliminary Specifications Preamble. 

Overall our decentralized production models price maker strategy invokes a high level of production discipline within the North American oil & gas industry. Achieving maximum profitability can only be gained through the fact that unprofitable properties dilute corporate earnings. Therefore the need to ensure they are fulfilling their primary task of maximizing profitability becomes the predominant method of production discipline. In order to compete in the capital markets of the 21st century will be much different than what it was in previous years. With technology and other industries providing growth opportunities, for oil & gas companies to continue to assert they are in a growth mode precludes them from that competition. They are a primary industry with commodities that are subject to the price maker principles of economics. An industry where shale reserves have changed the game from scarcity to abundance. This will also affect the producer's capital allocation and capital discipline. Capital investments will only be made with the assumption or demand that they be immediately profitable, and why would they invest in them if they can’t achieve that criteria. This invokes a far different criteria as to what is done in the industry and we can cast the foolishness of “building balance sheets” and the like to the scrap heap. Balance sheets are the fallout consequences of managing the business, not an objective.

Cash demands in the industry are currently one of the producer's pressing difficulties. A consistent theme that has defined a cultural dependence on annual outside capital infusions. This is due to all of the producer's costs outside of operations being more or less capitalized and then recognized as depletion over the course of several decades. This includes the capitalization of large percentages of overhead and interest. By not recognizing overhead costs in the current period producers are therefore able to more easily declare a specious profitability. However, the cash that was consumed in those overhead costs is not returned in the current period in the prices of the commodity charged to the consumer. These overhead costs currently sit as assets on the balance sheet in property, plant and equipment, or as we call them “the unrecognized capital costs of prior production,” for the next few decades before they’ll be realized as depletion and returned as cash. Therefore the search for new cash each month to replenish the cash float has been the producers issue for the past number of decades. When investors were willing, this was not an issue with the annual top up of investors dollars being priced to cover these costs. Now the reality of their specious accounting haunts them daily as they try to find new cash sources to cover the basic overhead costs of their operation. Working capital has been and will continue to be a crisis in the industry under the current business model. No matter what commodity price is attained. 

Basic cash management would have indicated this to the officers and directors many decades ago. (I wonder why they never changed these methods? I’m sure they must have had their reasons! Other interested parties should ask these probing, and revealing questions.) With the Preliminary Specification recognizing overhead in the current period as part of the operation, capturing that in the price charged to the consumer, return of the cash to the producer will occur within that production month. That however assumes profitable operations are conducted and all costs are accounted for appropriately. I’m on record, and allege that hasn’t happened. Calling the producers accounting specious and deliberately deceptive. I do at times wonder what costs are contained in capitalized overhead that no one ever seems to be aware of? Both in terms of their size and composition. I do know each account never breaches the level of materiality during the annual audit, but outside of that these state secrets seem to me to be the reason that officers and directors have never changed these methods despite the negative consequences they cause and the Preliminary Specifications availability since August 2012.

Our user community and their service providers are involved in the delivery of the explicit knowledge that will have been captured in our ERP software and the tacit knowledge of the individuals within each of the service provider firms. Fulfilling the role of the accounting and administrative needs of the producers with a variable, industry based accounting and administrative capacity and capability. We are delivering these in what we’re calling Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas. Building and leveraging the same principles of specialization and division of labor that deliver the extreme value proposition of cloud computing.

With the clear objective of rebuilding the industry brick by brick, and stick by stick in a style of rebuilding that will involve a dynamic industry that can be based on a decentralized, connected environment such as the Internet provides. People, Ideas & Objects et al don’t have to break down oil & gas in order to conduct this rebuilding. The rebuilding is necessary as a result of the damage and destruction from the chronic mistreatment industry has experienced at the hands of the officers and directors of the producer firms. Hierarchical strata of advanced paper shufflers is a future failure, best defined. To bring about an ERP system for the industry such as the Preliminary Specification provides; must consider the opportunity of what is commonly referred to as disintermediation. And People, Ideas & Objects, our user community and their service provider organizations abide. 

The nature of this rebuilding process that we’re undertaking is the cannibalization of the processes that have occurred since the investors sent their message of dissatisfaction to producers in 2015. Being solely dependent upon investor cash demanded that cuts in the organization were necessary when the producers sole source of value generation, the investors annual injection of additional capital, was no longer available. Keeping the production processes in place was the priority and those processes that are involved in the early stages of the development of oil & gas were subject to layoffs. Assuming that the situation would be alleviated in the following year and any resources would be recalled. Since the inactivity and abstinence of the officers and directors has carried on for seven years we can assume that the process management has been cut well into the seven year development cycle. Therefore either way, through People, Ideas & Objects et al or SAP the processes will need to be redefined and rebuilt. 

However, bringing one of the most complex systems into one of the most complex industries into the environment of the small and startup, or any producer is foolhardy to consider. How could that ever be a commercial software product? Or be provided to a commercially viable small or junior oil & gas producer? And that is the fact of the issue we stand with today as a result of the officers and directors “consolidation as a solution” and with SAP as an alternative. We need to ensure the future of the industry is in the hands of the oil & gas men and women who will knock down the barriers that stand in their way, just as so many have done before. The constraints and reality of the regulatory, compliance and investment demands are real and an impediment to these needs. That is, if producers could not access the kind of systems necessary to operate in that environment, no matter their size, the capital markets will remain forever closed to them. An untenable barrier today that will be even more so in the near future. It is an explicit request by investors that tier 1 ERP systems be implemented. Therefore all producers need to understand that the production discipline provided by the Preliminary Specification is necessary across all classifications of producer firms. 

Under the Preliminary Specification a startup or junior producer would no longer need to establish the point where they’ll have to generate in excess of $3 to $5 million of free cash flow necessary to offset the annual base overhead of the producer firm. For the administrative and accounting they’ll only be incurring the variable overhead costs of the service providers fees that they use and the costs of the software development assessment by People, Ideas & Objects each year. Recall we noted recently that not only are these overhead costs variable, but if they’re incurred that denotes profitable production, indicating these costs are covered, or the property is not producing and as a result not generating any costs. And there are more attributes of our system that provide benefits for the new oil & gas industry we are rebuilding. 

The Preliminary Specification also implements specialization and the division of labor across the producer firm and most particularly in the earth science and engineering capabilities and capacities of the producer firms. We list this as the first step in our solution for the startup and junior producers. These capacities and capabilities are becoming increasingly burdensome to each of the producer firms due to their unshared and unshareable nature, but for different reasons from the administrative and accounting difficulties mentioned. The costs incurred to maintain these capabilities are growing as a result of the advancement of their science and technological development which demands further specializations be undertaken within each of the producer's capabilities, and critical competitive advantages. We believe that all producers have reached the point where the demands to maintain these capacities and capabilities have expanded beyond the usable population of these technical resources. Or will soon. With the retirement of the brain trust of the industry, and the universities not producing anywhere near the replacement number necessary, a critical shortage will soon demand that these technical resources will become too rare, too costly and too unavailable to maintain, not to mention, expand the deliverability of the North America based industry. 

Consolidated producers will have particular difficulty managing this technical resource when entrepreneurs see the startup opportunities we’re defining here. That is, if only there were an ERP system that provided a solution for the oil & gas startup to deal with the compliance, governance and regulatory environment and be able to access funding! In addition to this limited technical resource supply we also believe that the producers' firms are close to a point now where the costs of their scientific engineering and geology needs are beyond their commercial grasp necessary to maintain their just in time operator status. Nonetheless, a decidedly higher level of specialization and division of labor will be needed in the areas of earth science and engineering. It is the unshared and unshareable makeup of these capabilities that we find the difficulties once again. Producers need these technical resources for a variety of just-in-time purposes, as operators, for their highly technical areas. If we assume that across the industry the utilization rate of these technical resources are at 75% due to their organizational inefficiencies. Then by releasing that other 25% and deploying that unused and unusable capability more effectively we’ll have what I believe to be the second aspect of the solution of these pending and most certainly future difficulties. A one third increase in the capacity with higher output from enhanced specialization and division of labor, providing us a good start to solving this pending critical resource shortfall.

Instead of letting another issue manifest itself into a crisis level issue. People, Ideas & Objects et al have implemented a variety of changes within the Preliminary Specification. The first is to consider the producer firm from the time the Preliminary Specification is operational, to have two sources of revenues. The oil & gas sales and the revenues earned by all of their earth science and engineering capacities and capabilities being deployed and employed in the form of a revenue generating capacity. Whether that be to one of the producers own Joint Operating Committees, or in the consulting of the individual to other producers / Joint Operating Committees, as a client, of which they may / may not have an interest in. Due to the specialization and division of labor demands producers will need to have chosen to specialize or acquire a specific capability on the basis of the distinct higher level specializations and competitive advantages they hold or desire. These producer revenues will then offset these engineering and geological costs incurred and charged to either their Joint Operating Committees or other producer clients. And through this enhanced specialization and division of labor achieve some of the 240 fold increase in productivity that Adam Smith experienced in his pin factory.

In terms of an opportunity in this new oil & gas industry, in which we are building brick by brick, and stick by stick, this second source of revenue should be seen as the initiation of the start up oil & gas producer firms' startup revenues. Granted the startup’s technical capabilities and competitive advantages will be more generic or less specialized than the more advanced firms. These revenues will offset the additional costs of the head office burden not considered part of the administrative and accounting category. And this will apply to all producers no matter their production profile. When producers are specializing on their distinct competitive advantages, and all producers including Exxon, Shell and Chevron will need to do so, the demand for outside technical resources will be required to augment their needs.

In a world where software has to define and support the organizations that exist. This is some of the what, how and why we’re able to provide when the Preliminary Specification is delivered to all producers in the North American industry. Instead of being mere serfs as the officers and directors wish to continue treating the engineers and geologists, they’ll be able to take control of their careers from this point forward. The facility most responsible for this capability of making direct labor charges to the Joint Operating Committee is what we are implementing in the industry is our Work Order. Officers and directors may claim that charging labor directly is already available through the systems they use. Which is true they’re able to allocate some of these labor costs to the field, some are assumed to be captured in overhead allowances which the Preliminary Specification eliminates the use of. However their methods do not provide the necessary features of raising it to the point of making it a defined revenue stream of the firm. And the feature of making it a system that interacts throughout the industry. Allowing for the interactions between the resources they need and where they need them. Subject to the appropriate approvals and governance. Theirs does not enable the second purpose of our Work Order system that enhances the industry wide innovativeness through the establishment of working groups etc. Our Work Order system is able to bill its costs at all times to either corporate overhead, Joint Operating Committee overhead, an AFE or to a lease. Therefore the billable time of the individual engineer or geologist should be deployed within the producer at 100% of the time or not be working for the producer. And this is an inherent part of these people beginning the establishment of their own producer firms which rely on their talents of their much needed earth science and engineering capacities, capabilities and Intellectual Property. An industry where it will be less important who you know, but what you know and what you're capable of delivering, what is the value proposition that you’re offering? We’re only beginning with the what, how, and why the Preliminary Specification facilitates the dynamic, innovative, accountable and profitable startup, junior, intermediate, senior and multinational oil & gas producers.

People, Ideas & Objects Response to a Request for Proposal, Part III

Organizational Constructs

Key to the Preliminary Specifications value proposition is its alignment to six different organizational constructs that impute an understanding and common sense approach of how our system operates. These organizational constructs consist of the Joint Operating Committee, enabling and facilitating the expansion of Specialization and the Division of Labor, Intellectual Property, Innovation, Markets and Information Technology. Developers and users of the system will default to these constructs for the process definitions, frameworks and methods used in order to gain an enhanced understanding of what should be the case and the follow on consequences. Enabling an approach where a dynamic, innovative, accountable and profitable oil & gas producer will be the focus of all who work within the greater oil & gas economy.

The Joint Operating Committee

The first organizational construct that contributes to our value proposition is the use of the Joint Operating Committee as the key organizational construct of the dynamic, innovative, accountable and profitable oil & gas producer. The Joint Operating Committee is the industry's legal, financial, operational decision making, cultural, communication, innovation and strategic framework of the industry. When we move the compliance and governance frameworks of the producer firm away from the hierarchy and into alignment with the seven frameworks of the Joint Operating Committee, we’ll achieve an increased organizational speed, innovativeness and accountability in producers. Continuing on with the theme of this wiki page of “what, how and why” we do that, these are some of the advantages that are gained.

Adoption of the culture of the oil & gas industry in the form of the Joint Operating Committee is one of the fundamental changes that we’ve made in our ERP system. By doing so we’ve changed everything that is currently done in oil & gas administration and accounting and recognifigured it around what is unquestionably its cultural method of operation. Creating an opportunity to provide a solution to these issues and take this once in an industries lifetime opportunity to move back to the more natural flow of the oil & gas business, focused around the seven frameworks of the Joint Operating Committee.

Our research taught us that when alignment of compliance and governance with operational decision making occurs, accountability is the result. This is intuitively understood. We believe this to be a source of conflict throughout the oil & gas industry today which creates an atmosphere and culture of unaccountable decision making. The contradiction occurs when operators assume the responsibility of managing the Joint Operating Committee based on the need to have the requisite capabilities available to conduct the necessary field operations. The Joint Operating Committee holds the operational decision making authority which is then delegated in the operating procedure to an operator based on the results of voting by its producer participants. A threshold percentage is established for any decision to be passed. Let's assume 60% is the required percentage for approval and the operator has a 33% working interest. Decisions are then made on this basis, AFE’s are issued, funds are spent and the initiative fails. Who’s responsible and who needs to be accountable for the difficulties experienced? We believe this to be the root cause of a related issue we identified in our discussion regarding Specialization and the Division of Labor. When producers have never been held accountable for the day to day individual field decisions that were made, during any period of their tenure at the producer, why would they then be held accountable for any decisions when they’ve assumed the officer or director roles in the firm? Just “muddle through.” It is the culture of the industry which developed over the past six decades that underpins this unaccountability. In its place a culture of excuses, blaming and generation of what we call viable scapegoats is the product of this lack of accountability. To resolve this the Preliminary Specification aligns and implements the Compliance & Governance module to the operational decision making framework of the Joint Operating Committee to establish a new culture of accountability for the decisions that are made.

The next point is related to the accountability issue and to other issues around the resource restrictions that are looming in the earth science and engineering resource supply. Professor Richard N. Langlois was an extensive source of primary research we used throughout the Preliminary Specification. His research is in the area of Industrial Economics and the Economics of Innovation. He raises what he calls the agency issue or rights assignment problem in his working paper “The Austrian Theory of the Firm: Retrospect and Prospect.”

The question then becomes: why are capabilities sometimes organized within firms, sometimes decentralized in markets, and sometimes coordinated by a myriad contractual and ownership arrangements like joint ventures, franchisees, and networks? Explicitly echoing Hayek, Jensen and Meckling (1992, p.251) who point out that economic organization must solve two different kinds of problems: "the rights assignment problem (determining who should exercise a decision right) and the control or agency problem (how to ensure that self-interested decision agents exercise their rights in a way that contributes to the organizational objective)." There are basically two ways to ensure such a "collocation" of knowledge and decision making: "One is by moving the knowledge to those with the decision rights; the other is by moving the decision rights to those with the knowledge." (Jensen and Meckling 1992 p. 253). p. 6

Oil & gas has a looming crisis in its ability to source the appropriate level of engineering and geological resources available to it as a result of retirements, low numbers of graduates and higher production throughput. People, Ideas & Objects therefore questioned whether the ability of each producer firm would be able to continue to establish the full suite of their in-house earth science and engineering capabilities and capacities at the level necessary to meet all of their needs, just-in-time, on a go forward, commercial basis. This would be particularly difficult when the solution to the shortfall in resources can only be resolved by a revised specialization and division of labor. Producers would not be able to commercially sustain the burden of a full suite of operator capacities and capabilities with such a diverse demand after specialization and the division of labor. And therefore we concluded the control or agency problem would need to be resolved on the basis of the knowledge being transferred to where the decision rights were held. It is specifically in the Research & Capabilities, Knowledge & Learning and Resource Marketplace, but also throughout all of the modules of the Preliminary Specification that we’ve moved the knowledge of each of the participating producers in a Joint Operating Committee into alignment with its operational decision rights. Where it is then possible to pool the available and specialized technical resources of the producer members of that Joint Operating Committee or available in the specialized market.

A secondary point I would raise is the definition of capabilities. Professor Langlois has provided the following definition from his paper “Modularity in Organization, Technology and Society”.

This is the basic modularization of the market economy. It accords well with the modularization G. B. Richardson (1972) suggested in offering the concept of economic capabilities. By capabilities Richardson means "knowledge, experience, and skills" (1972, p. 888), a notion related to what Jensen and Meckling (1992) call "specific knowledge'' and to what Hayek (1945) called "knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place." p. 27

To which we’ve humbly suggested that “ideas” be added to that list. We also have Professor Carliss Baldwin noting that “knowledge begets capability and capability begets action.” 

What will become of the oil & gas earth science and engineering related capabilities and capacities now that officers and directors have cast their future to clean energy. Renouncing shale and casting it to the back seat of the bus where no one will see or hear from it again. Shale being what can unquestionably be the most advanced science the industry has ever seen or developed. Shale technologies will at best develop no further, atrophy or be cast to the four winds. I’ll reiterate that People, Ideas & Objects have a plan to make shale commercial in the energy independent North American market in the form of the Preliminary Specification. Shale is a critical and highly necessary element of North America's energy independence. 

Officers and directors of producer firms have to stop reading the tea leaves as to what they believe investors want. Investors want profits, everywhere and always, and that is all. With their contrived positioning of clean energy and environmental concerns I would ask what is it in oil & gas that will be the new frontier if it is not clean energy? Offshore, the arctic or conventional, maybe heavy oil or any of the other areas producers previously renounced as commercially viable? It is this focus on clean energy that will do more damage to the industry and seal the fate of the existing producers. What message is being communicated to their investors in oil & gas or its related service industries. Let’s assume the service industry is looking for capital for a driller to build a new rig. Their potential investor’s first question would be “why? Producers aren’t focused on oil & gas, it's clean energy.”

In a related manner, if investors haven’t seen any effort by the officers and directors to make shale commercial, don’t see producers investing in their organizations profitability or remediating any of the damages, what message does that send?

People, Ideas & Objects have repeatedly stated the fact that each boe provides 10,000 to 25,000 man hours of equivalent labor, or 28 to 71 times the entire world's population. Producers' capitulation of shale resources should be seen as irresponsible when we understand that it’s the world's most powerful economy that is the largest consumer of energy. Why aren’t officers and directors seeking to make shale profitable and accountable by adopting the Preliminary Specification? It’s reasons such as these that the people who are elected to the boards of directors are given such responsibilities. Selling to energy consumers the immense value they gain from their use of oil & gas and taking the political high ground away from government actors and environmental groups. 

In terms of alignment of the legal framework of the industry. The Joint Operating Committee is the representative organization that is established for the partnership between producer firms in any and all oil & gas properties. It is the standard method in which industry operates and all agreements and understandings are on the basis of the work done through these joint ventures. It is a rarity that a producer firm will have a 100% interest in a property. The diversity of producers in these holdings are necessary to mitigate the producers financial risk and due to regulatory requirements demanding specific land holdings etc in order to drill and produce. Current accounting systems report on Joint Operating Committee activities however People, Ideas & Objects et al have expanded the accounting and administration of these organizations to the level of stand alone reporting entities. Producing detailed, actual, factual financial statements each month for each Joint Operating Committee. It is therefore in that manner that we’re able to evaluate the performance of the property on the basis of its actual cost on a competitive basis of what the North American capital markets expect. By ensuring that each Joint Operating Committee remains profitable on a monthly basis by not overproducing based on commodity price information. 

The need to have standardized accounting is necessary from the point of view of having industry rely on the outcome of these methods. Objectivity is achieved as the ability to deal with distinct situations or “manage” producer's data is counter productive due to the global dependence on the data. Consider the process of balancing the production data across the month, across a gas plant with 1 bcf / day processing. Consideration of the elements and needs of the industry and having them captured in the software is a necessity for this reason. The benefit of this strict interpretation is that when it’s reported that a property is not profitable according to our Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas’ standard and objective accounting. The producers in each of these Joint Operating Committees will know it is in their best interest to shut-in the property for the short term. They’ll know the property was assessed on the same basis, the agreements in the Joint Operating Committee, as all the other oil & gas properties throughout the continent and be satisfied with the understanding of the nature of that standard and objective accounting. They will know and be satisfied with the determination of profitability or loss, its impact on their organizations performance, their influence on the processes of determining that standard and objective method and govern themselves accordingly. And therefore increase their organizations performance by only producing profitable properties and to innovatively work within that framework and understanding to increase the value of the property.

It's no longer enough to own just the oil & gas assets. It’s also necessary to have access to the software in the form of the Preliminary Specification which makes the oil & gas assets profitable. We are configuring an industry of successful producer and service industry organizations based on the issues that have caused systemic failures that are and will continue to dictate future difficulties. Non participating producer boards of directors in this initiative will have told their shareholders they’ve opted out of an investment being made in their organizations profitability, accountability and performance.

People, Ideas & Objects Response to a Request for Proposal, Part II

 Our Value Proposition

What if ERP software in oil & gas was no longer seen as an overhead cost but as the business opportunity that it is? Which is the perspective that oil & gas producers need to adopt in order to move their organizations to a higher trajectory in terms of performance and accountability. There will be no further development of any organization in any industry without the software, and most particularly the ERP software, which defines and supports an organization's structure, performance and capability of changing. Otherwise we will continue to have the paradox that we have in oil & gas where the status quo is satisfied with the status quo and therefore only the status quo will ever be offered. People, Ideas & Objects believe this is the source of the tragic cost we’re all realizing with much more damage soon to arrive. It’s no longer adequate to just own the oil & gas asset. Without access to the ERP software in the form of the Preliminary Specification there is abundant evidence now that North American oil & gas assets will never be profitable. Regardless of the price of the commodity, producer officers and directors have proven not to be working in anyone's interest other than their own. The level of destruction they’ve authored has been unequaled in the history of business. We should note this occurred while our Preliminary Specification was being offered to mitigate these damages. The faith, trust and goodwill that was built in prior generations has been destroyed and the industry remains in the hands of those who operated in such bad faith. Now that there’s money on the table in the form of higher commodity prices, and potentially detrimental energy shortfalls this winter, actions need to be taken by the investors in oil & gas to specify the selection of an acceptable tier 1 ERP provider. And that selection can only be People, Ideas & Objects, our user community with their service provider organizations operational on Oracle Cloud ERP.

A brief example of the officers and directors record to clarify their culpability. Each of these specific events are generally known and can be easily verified. On July 4, 2019 People, Ideas & Objects published our White Paper “Profitable, North American Energy Independence, Through the Commercialization of Shale” to wide distribution. The title covers the point of the topic which is the development and integration of the Preliminary Specification. It was rejected out of hand by producer officers and directors who had done nothing about their organizations after many years of their investors' demands for action. Within nine months of the producer's rejection of our specific proposal to deal with the issue of shale, they ran the price of oil into the negative $40 range and were forced to shut-in production. A claim they made to refute the Preliminary Specifications validity in 2017, a claim that was knowingly, and subsequently, proven incorrect. Once oil prices recovered, these officers and directors declared that shale would never be commercial. And in 2021 they announced they were beginning the transition of their organizations to clean energy. Today we don’t know what business it is that they’re in? This is the quality and style of the leadership that is now responsible for our economies energy supply? A responsibility they’re unwilling to recognize, much like their inability to comprehend the need to earn “real” profits these past four decades? Where will we head to next with this unaccountable bunch? Instead of taking the leadership role of resolving the European energy crisis. Companies such as Shell's former CEO recently shrugged and said,

"It may well be that we have a number of winters where we have to somehow find solutions through efficiency savings, through rationing and as a very, very quick build out of alternatives, "Chief Executive Officer Ben Van Beurden told reporters at a conference in Stavanger, Norway. “That this is going to be somehow easy or over, I think is a fantasy we should put aside -- we should confront the reality.”

The reality that needs to be confronted is the industry dominant "muddle through" culture and strategy. Which has permeated all corners of the industry and aided in many parts of society through the dirty oil / environmental focus to accept that we can transition to clean energy and discard the use of conventional sources. Oil & Gas provides 10 to 25 thousand man hours equivalent mechanical labor per barrel of oil. This amounts to 28 to 71 times the mechanical labor of the entire current global population and if we have to ration or conserve this resource, as Mr. Van Beurden asserts, then we’re making decisions as to who may eat and who may work. We were also allegedly told we held 50 and 100 year supplies of oil & gas in shale formations available in the North American market a few years ago. This was prior to the unanimous declaration by the likes of Shell’s former CEO Mr. Van Beurden that shale would never be commercial and therefore abandoned and sold to invest in clean energy in 2021. Now we hear there may only be 10 to 15 more years of usable, drillable locations of shale in the U.S. How is this? The focus on reserves by oil & gas producers has and always will be redundant. Oil & gas exists in the minds of oil & gas men and women. Of which the industry's leadership, such as Mr. Van Beurden prefers chasing fairy tales in the land of perennial losses and the abhorrent accountability of clean energy. Oil & gas reserves are wholly dependent on economic conditions. At a $5 oil price there’s no oil in the world. At $150 there is a 50 year supply. Technical specifications as to the amount of oil in place are as useless as the estimated remaining usable life of a punch press in a manufacturer. 

In terms of the value People, Ideas & Objects generates, our Revenue Model provides for the lowest cost of obtaining an ERP system in the industry. And that is by charging for the costs of software development, plus an element of profit as our fee structure, on a shared basis across the North American producer population. Therefore the industry is only paying for the one time costs of ERP software development. A fundamentally more efficient value proposition than any of our competitors that are charging each producer individually. Our user community is implementing the Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas of our software and the services of their service provider organizations. Realizing the remarkable cost savings and associated benefits of the paradigm of cloud computing across the accounting and administrative domains of the industry. Where the substantial fixed costs of building administrative and accounting capabilities and capacities within each and every producer organization is a redundant, unshared, unshareable costly exercise that we believe is the secondary reason for the chronic lack of “real” profitability in the industry. Turning these non-competitive attributes of the producer firms into the variable overhead costs processed through People, Ideas & Objects Cloud Administration and Accounting for Oil & Gas service. Turning the administrative and accounting capabilities, capacities and costs in the industry to variable costs, based on profitable production. And therefore overhead of the producer firms and Joint Operating Committees will only be incurred during times of profitable production. The inherent benefit of our Preliminary Specifications decentralized production models price maker strategy, is that all production will be profitable, everywhere and always. And all overhead is therefore recovered in current operations. A critical difference to today's method of operation where most overhead is capitalized and therefore the cash incurred is recovered through depletion over subsequent decades. Leaving cash deficiencies for costs such as rent and administrative salaries etc to be replaced by the investors annual stock issuance!

We also provide value due to the fact we’re not focused on the traditional software company concerns of code and customers. Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas provides that we’re oriented and focused on the changing business of a dynamic, innovative, accountable and profitable oil & gas producer, and their associated service industries. This highlights the different motivations of the software developer over the long term. With People, Ideas & Objects we generate revenues on the basis of the changes and needs that are communicated through our user community. Our motivation is therefore the constant improvement of the software. In the traditional software vendor’s case they are motivated by their code and customer bases. The larger their code base the more difficult it becomes to change, which coincidentally does not generate revenue. And the larger the customer base the more costly any changes become to the software provider. Coincidentally, these changes to the customer software do not generate any revenues. Hence, their age and size as a firm paradoxically leads to increases in their development costs and overhead burden. What we have is a contrast and conflict in the dynamic nature of the software itself in terms of its cost to each of the oil & gas producers and the motivation behind the developer. In addition People, Ideas & Objects use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and specifically Oracle Cloud ERP which are based on Java, the first object based ERP system. Therefore People, Ideas & Objects will be the first object based ERP system that is available in the North American oil & gas industry. Providing additional cost benefits over the traditional procedural programming languages.

It is each of these areas that set a foundation for the material value proposition that we provide the North American producers. We have valued this in the range of $25.7 to $45.7 trillion dollars over the next 25 years. There are many aspects of our offering that are not qualifiable or quantifiable and they are detailed in the discussion below. Our quantified numbers are simply as a result of two factors that show that operating the industry on the basis of profitability everywhere and always has a $5.7 trillion dollar increase in the earnings of the North American producers. The remaining $20 to $40 trillion dollars is the amount of capital costs, identified by others estimates, of what is necessary for the next 25 years. Having our Preliminary Specification cycle through the producer's capital costs on a rapid basis, the recovery of overhead in the current month and other methods of managing the business and its cash as a business. Using the same investor dollars repeatedly on a cycle that competes with the North American capital markets expectations eliminates the need to demand the $20 to $40 trillion in new capital from investors to build those handsome balance sheets.

We only include this otherwise redundant business number as part of our value proposition as there has not been any change in the methods used in industry to recognize that a capital intensive industry demands that the consumer's product cost will reflect its capital intensive nature. That has not been the case in the past number of decades. Or the past decade in which the Preliminary Specification has been available. It is investors who have subsidized consumers' use of energy by paying the capital costs. The amount of the subsidy reflected in property, plant and equipment on the producers balance sheets in property, plant and equipment or as we call it, the unrecognized capital cost of past production. Officers and directors have relied on a steady stream of new investor cash each and every year for decades, declared they’re profitable in the most specious manner and left the assets on the balance sheet for the CEO to run down mainstreet and brag how big they grew their balance sheet and how much “cash they put in the ground.” Only in oil & gas could one hear such arguments, however we were subjected to a chorus of this each quarter across North America. 

This overreporting of assets has an equal and commensurate effect on overreported profits. High profits attract investors to invest leading ultimately to overcapacity and overproduction of the oil & gas commodities that are subject to the economic principles of price makers. Therefore collapsing the price of the commodities for the four decades these policies have been in effect. The consequence is an industry that has a present value that is negative. It consumes cash in order to fund its operations. Only People, Ideas & Objects et al have identified this issue and rectified it in our software with the Preliminary Specifications solution of our decentralized production models price maker strategy. 

Contrasting Visions

People, Ideas & Objects, our user community and their service provider organizations have painted a viable and profitable vision of how to rebuild the oil & gas economy in North America from the ashes of what remains. We see the destruction, and much of what will come to be in the next few years and it is not something that people expect. Producer firms are comprehensive failures of tragic proportions. Action is needed to proceed with this software development initiative, and from whom, when and where our funding is sourced is not within our domain of knowing. We only know the one important criteria necessary in order to make this a success. The funding has to come from the oil & gas industry itself. Otherwise industry won’t respect these developments, won’t commit to them, and would only look to alternatives as soon as the opportunity arose. Only when they have some “skin in the game” can we begin to start rebuilding the greater oil & gas economy brick by brick, and stick by stick.

The Preliminary Specification is now a decade old, what if its existence was no longer available, would there be any dividends, stock repurchases or paying off of bank debt by producers? What if the threat of having the option to use the Preliminary Specification no longer existed in oil & gas? The producer firms officers and directors may be on the verge of making this ideal situation for themselves permanent. What they have and have always wanted is just around the corner and only People, Ideas & Objects, our user community and service provider organizations are standing in their way. Producers have cash streaming in, unaccountable organizations that could overnight and at a whim be involved in a variety of different businesses. Accounting methods that have been accepted by all concerned in the industry for decades, including the CPA firms, and a culture of fill in your own adjective here. It’s decision time as People, Ideas & Objects believe the producers are moving now to seal their legacy of unaccountability and non performance in the selection process of a tier 1 ERP system. 

One of the specific requests and requirements by the oil & gas producers investors is that they implement a tier 1 ERP system, such as Oracle Cloud ERP or SAP. The base of the Preliminary Specification is Oracle Cloud ERP and would therefore qualify for this requirement. SAP is used by a few of the oil & gas producer organizations and they are currently offering their solution as we speak. SAP’s system is designed for manufacturing companies where the ability to organize first, second, and third tier industry product production, just-in-time is attainable. Major auto manufacturers use it and SAP makes them their priority as it does any global manufacturing concern. SAP sells their product to oil & gas producers however does not have an oil & gas solution. On September 12, 2022 SAP hosted their 11th annual oil & gas conference in Houston and virtually, and have published a white paper to reflect what they’re selling in oil & gas. On page 6 we see they focus on “Paving the Way for Business Model Innovations” indicating to me they don’t have a plan. However we read on.

• Oil, gas and energy companies pursue a bold vision for 2025 to deliver safe, reliable and sustainable energy products and services focused on the customer and enabled by innovation.
• To do this oil, gas and energy companies will implement new business models with a keen focus on sustainable energy transition. This will include investing in renewables, focusing on retail, electric vehicle (EV) charging at fueling stations, and carbon-cost reduction. 
• To manage the magnitude of data volume through production and operations, collaboration on access to, and analysis of data require intelligent technologies such as AI and machine learning. Connected machines and business processes can help realize industry 4.0 aspirations. 
• Larger oil, gas and energy companies will continue to diversify into adjacent industries such as utilities, solar and wind power, and energy storage.

SAP’s white paper shows the focus on Information Technology to solve the issues facing oil & gas. Touching on all the key talking points, yet we find no instance of the words accountable, accountability or performance. This white paper and their Houston conference reflect SAP’s marketing brilliance which has been stellar and a study for some of the best examples in business. What I see SAP doing here is they’re making public the news that they’re selling unaccountability to producer officers and directors who want to maintain their chronic lack of accountability. Maintaining and permanently securing a lack of accountability in the organization through the ERP software cementing their bureaucratic manner and method of operation for the long term. I’m predicting sales of SAP once the September 2022 conference is over. 

Once SAP is implemented, producers will be defined by their officers and directors in whatever business they may happen to choose that day and built upon the framework of non accountability that has worked so well for them personally. In terms of “what, how and why” SAP proposes to resolve the oil & gas issues and opportunities there is nothing in their white paper. On the contrary it’s heavily focused on environmentally based clean energy transitions in a “safe, reliable and sustainable” way, continuing with the unauthorized diversion of oil & gas revenues that oil & gas investors created with their investment in the oil & gas business. Profits continue to be irrelevant, therefore producers' money either comes from trees or investors. What should also be stated is that without a defined plan in place, SAP’s system will need to set out to define, design and architect the system. A process that took a decade for People, Ideas & Objects as it does for all appropriately built systems. Then the system will need to be built by extending the current officers and directors culture. 

People, Ideas & Objects focus on oil & gas is unwavering and could see the clean energy initiative for what it was. An opportunity to be unaccountable for any of the oil & gas investors money spent in that direction. There is no opportunity for any of the clean energy initiatives to begin to carry the freight that oil & gas does on a daily basis and we discussed that at length in our July 4, 2019 white paper “Profitable, North American Energy Independence - Through the Commercialization of Shale.” Using the Manhattan Institutes Mark Mills to present the fact that the physics do not support a viable or commercial outcome of either wind, solar or battery technologies. We see now the European marketplace, who bought the tailor’s new clothes in the form of this energy transition, are now aware of their purchases deficiencies. Further pursuit in this direction by oil & gas producers only exposes their continued misuse and abuse of their power, authority and responsibility. After a year of this transition it is evident to me that the alleged investors' push and drive for clean energy was contrived for these purposes.

Some people may say that it will be difficult for SAP to build a solution in an environment where the Intellectual Property being commercialized by People, Ideas & Objects exists and has to be avoided. That however will be a bureaucratic feature, and not a bug. The Preliminary Specification will become the excuse that producers will state “we can’t enhance the performance accounting or accountability due to the existing IP that legally has to be avoided.” This may become the latest, and greatest viable scapegoat of all time. 

When I published in 2004 that organizations were defined, supported but also constrained by the ERP software they used. Producers interpreted that as the point in which no further developments of any kind would be done to any of the ERP systems they used. Cementing their organizations in the bureaucratic stasis that they are. Enabling them to secure their hold on power for a few decades longer. Not looking at the need to establish the permanent software development capability of the Preliminary Specification to ensure continued organizational development. Therefore in 2022 the prospective avoidance of People, Ideas & Objects IP will be a further extension of this same logic that precludes producers from ever attaining any level of performance or accountability expected of them. 

People, Ideas & Objects Response to a Request for Proposal, Part I

 Abstract

People, Ideas & Objects, our user community, their service provider organizations and Oracle Cloud ERP are based on providing the dynamic, innovative, accountable and profitable oil & gas producer with the most profitable means of oil & gas operations in North America. Our approach is business oriented to focus the industry on generating real profitability to ensure that society is provided with abundant, affordable and reliable energy to fuel their economy. The most powerful economy known to man. Our value proposition is derived from the disintermediation of the hierarchy. To fully adopt and integrate the industry standard Joint Operating Committee, the legal, financial, operational decision making, cultural, communication, strategic and innovation framework of the industry. Sound economic principles such as specialization and the division of labor and Professor Paul Romer's "New Growth Theory" regarding non-rival goods to establish our Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas capability. Eliminating the need for each individual producer to build the same non-competitive capabilities of administrative and accounting expertise on an unshared and unshareable basis. Implementation of our decentralized production model as part of our business model ensures that "real" profitability will be earned everywhere and always. There are many other attributes of our value proposition such as innovation that can not be readily quantified and qualified. However, all of these are focused on generating value for all concerned. Where profitability in the primary industry of oil & gas is necessary to ensure that a healthy and prosperous, overall greater oil & gas economy is maintained and sustained for the long term. 

There is no other source of financial resources to do so. Governments only spend money that is taxed from earnings and profits. Investors only allocate their investments from other profitable areas of the economy. Oil & gas producers participating in a primary industry must stand on their own and provide for themselves, the service industry and all the subsidiary industries that are dedicated exclusively to their success. They must provide value for their investors and bankers, their employees and ensure that a healthy prosperous industry is handed down to others. Profits are the only means in which anyone and anything can be sustained on this basis for the long term. To do so takes effort, skill, courage and perseverance. None of these attributes can be pointed to in the current officers and directors of the producers, who coincidentally hold all the authority and responsibility to ensure profitability and accountability are attained, and are the only group who've obtained any personal value from this industry for many decades. These are disconcerting and difficult words aimed directly at those who make the decisions as to which ERP system to use. However, the destruction and damage they've authored is a fundamental betrayal to all those who have worked to build the industry constructively. It is only the officers and directors that have the authority and responsibility necessary to make the changes and avoid a further catastrophe by choosing to implement People, Ideas & Objects, our user community and service providers Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas service..

To resolve the current difficulties that plague the North American oil & gas industry demands that we organize an approach to how it’ll be resolved. That is the work that People, Ideas & Objects et al propose to do with input from the oil & gas, service and all the tertiary industries involved in the greater oil & gas economy. Readers will note our contradiction in that statement and the belittlement of SAP by commenting that their approach is "blind sleepwalking agents of whomever will feed them." Our approach follows the industry culture contained in the Joint Operating Committee and five other organizational constructs, the overall vision of the Preliminary Specification, our user community vision providing them with the authority and responsibility to implement it with the assistance they require from industry. SAP is following the officers and directors. Industry culture is defined in the Preliminary Specifications six organization constructs consisting of the Joint Operating Committee, Innovation, Markets, Intellectual Property, Information Technology and Specialization and the Division of Labor. The Markets being driven as an organizational construct on the basis of price.

This new oil & gas organizational structure will be the derivative software product of People, Ideas & Objects Preliminary Specification and the services of our user communities and their service providers. What we describe as a rebuild of the industry on a brick by brick and stick by stick basis. We aren't trashing the industry to the dustbin of history. Unfortunately the officers and directors of the producer firms have already done so. Software is what defines and supports the organization in society today. Serendipity, spontaneous order, disintermediation and creative destruction have been hamstrung by the fact that software also constrains an organization in proverbial cement based on its current process management definition. To make any organizational or process change has to be orchestrated through the software first in order to have the change take effect. Otherwise the organization will quickly regress back to the processes existing in the organization's software definition. This is the consequence of our dependence on Information Technology and is what we’ve called a modern day software bug. One that has cost the industry its prosperity as officers and directors took this knowledge, never changed the organizations ERP software and therefore secured their methods of personal aggrandizement. 

Fast forward to the third quarter of 2022 and People, Ideas & Objects believe this same logic is being used again. Oil & Gas investors are demanding producers move to tier 1 ERP systems to enhance their profitability and accountability, of which we qualify with Oracle Cloud ERP. Will producer officers and directors be using this logic to select SAP with their vision of clean energy and pliable "blind sleepwalking agents of whomever will feed them" approach to marketing in order to secure the sale? We believe this would have a detrimental effect on People, Ideas & Objects by eliminating the Preliminary Specification as an active software offering for at least a generation. SAP would have to deliberately avoid our Intellectual Property and that would be considered a feature, not a bug by these officers and directors. Providing them with another viable scapegoat as to why they can not provide the style of accountability or performance being asked of them. Lastly it would ensure the industry maintains the status quo strategy of "muddle along."

Regarding the difficulties we find ourselves with respect to energy. I feel we do not have a handle on the situation and control is out of reach of these current organizations officers and directors. Where we are at is maybe best explained in the Winston Churchill quote, 

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Background

As pertinent background information, I began this adventure in 1991, I spent the first year promoting Oracle to join in our development of client server systems for Canadian oil & gas. This initiative failed in February 1997 as a result of my firm's inability to secure any commitment from oil & gas producers. Or in retrospect, I believe now that producers rejected the system due to the high level of accountability being introduced. Oracle subsequently tried on their own with Oracle Energy and found the same outcome, no participation from the producers for the same reasons, and left in 2000. There is an inherent level of commitment evident in Oracle's near decade long actions regarding oil & gas ERP systems that is not evident in SAP’s. A 22 page white paper and three day conference are superficial in comparison to the Preliminary Specifications 330 thousand word, viable business model and an active user community that began its development in 2014. Accountable ERP systems have been deliberately avoided for at least the three decades of my involvement and those who offered such products have not benefited due to their specific pursuit of enhanced producer performance, accountability and integrity.

Oracle’s market capitalization is now $206 billion and is the premier ERP provider in the world according to Gartner, SAP’s is $109 billion. I do not recall SAP’s efforts to build an oil & gas solution in the manner that Oracle or IBM have. Together Oracle and People, Ideas & Objects can build the Preliminary Specification to solve these critical issues for the oil & gas industry. And do so by first avoiding the issue of these officers and directors of the North American based producer firms and their desire to maintain their systemic lack of accountability. 

Looking at the decision to purchase and implement an ERP system. It’s expensive, it’s time consuming, it affects the management of the firm and tightens the compliance and governance of their actions. It holds the officers and directors accountable for their actions and decisions. Accounting is about the reporting of performance and as I’ve documented throughout these writings the oil & gas producer officers and directors have morphed the purpose of their accounting to recording value as they’ve chirped in their “building balance sheets” and "putting cash in the ground" mantra. People, Ideas & Objects believe that a capital intensive industry's products would contain high levels of capital costs. Which, if industry would adopt our methods by implementing the Preliminary  Specification, would allow producers to perform and compete for capital on North American capital markets. The ERP decision is made at the board of directors level based on the officers recommendations. Due to the high cost, time and disruption that occurs in the producer firms that undertake ERP implementations, this level of the organization's involvement is mandatory to make the decision. Once the decision is made it would not even be considered again for at least seven years and only if management were dissatisfied. 

I became aware of a specific ask for a tier 1 ERP implementation by investors a few years ago and am unaware of how long it has been since it was first requested. What we do know is that unlike the move to clean energy which was implemented the night the investors allegedly asked, and in what I’ve described was an unauthorized manner, we are unaware of any producer investing in ERP systems. This is wholly consistent with the refusal to provide competitive investment performance through appropriate profitability for the past number of decades. On the one hand moving into unrelated, uncompetitive industries that have no record of performance or value generation, no history of success and massive government involvement is done immediately. The producers, officers and directors will be able to justify these actions with the simple viable scapegoat that they’re “saving the planet,” and the reason they’re not profitable is “they haven’t figured it out yet” for their continuing poor performance. Focusing on oil & gas and enhancing its performance doesn’t intrigue them for some reason, they've abandoned shale as “non commercial” less than 2 years ago. Alternatively enhancing the level of accountability of their actions by implementing the August 2012 publication of the Preliminary Specification, our user community and their service provider organizations is obviously never going to happen if SAP meets the tier 1 ERP requirement demanded by their investors and selected by the producer officers and directors. 

I’ll emphasize the year I started this was 1991, 1992 with Oracle and both ours and their initiatives failed due to the inability of producers to get involved? Yes, that’s a question. This isn’t an issue of the investors that began in 2020 or whenever they first requested the ERP system upgrade to tier 1. This is a culture, a behavior and an infestation across the North American producer population of officers and directors designed to maintain their enhanced personal financial compensation. It is a necessity that producer firms implement the Preliminary Specification in order to wrest control from the hands of a small cadre of officers and directors that have found the source of their personal wealth is through a deliberate, destructive and dangerous level of unaccountability. One that has caused enormous risk to now be realized in societies inability to source profitable energy independence from secure, reliable and affordable oil & gas and about to become permanent if they implement SAP’s ERP software. 

I would like to take a moment to speak about those ERP providers that are in the market throughout this time and the stellar efforts they’ve done. It's one thing to avoid the tier 1 ERP providers and maintain the history as I’ve briefly described here. There are a number of ERP providers that cater exclusively to oil & gas that have been in the business for many years and decades. They too have experienced the abuse of the producer officers and directors who seek deceptive levels of accountability. To suggest these ERP providers have been put on a shoestring diet would be unfair and more appropriate to describe it as a second hand shoestring diet. Never paying for the application itself was a common tactic, only signing a service contract. Never sponsoring any changes to the systems they used. Producer officers and directors have the systems they want providing them with the obscurity they desire, why would they change that? Ensuring that their accounting and ERP systems were always inadequate. And I say that with all due respect to my competitors who have done the impossible in the most hostile of business environments. And should they have provided the accountability necessary, they too would have joined People, Ideas & Objects on the outside looking in.

Let me suggest a hypothesis that builds upon the situation that we have today. If oil & gas producers had the appropriate tier 1 ERP providers in place for the past decades of this history. Would the industry have fallen into the financial, operational and political crisis that we see the greater North American oil & gas economy has become today? Is it the lack of effective ERP systems, including SAP, that have reported inappropriate results of producer firms that enabled the industry to fall into the disaster and destruction that it currently is? I’ll reiterate that the lack of effective ERP systems is the deliberate and desired outcome of the producers' officers and directors actions over the course of these many decades. 

The questions producer officers and directors should be asking themselves. Will consumers demonstrate the same tolerance, patience and perseverance that both their oil & gas investors and People, Ideas & Objects have displayed these past years? Or will they want answers sooner and hold producers accountable for their energy demands and whatever else may be on their minds? Will they demand more than “muddle through” as an answer, and who will they turn to to heat their homes and earn their living? Having a permanent, entrenched and SAP supported, unaccountable organization is a greater concern for the consumers than the oil & gas investor. Investors could always sell their interests. I would advise these officers and directors to rethink their approach and ask themselves, just because they can continue with their unaccountable ways, does that mean they should? No one questions that the oil & gas reserves are in place as a result of the shale formations. No one questions the oil & gas producers capacity to spend investor money to increase deliverability. What’s different today is that investors aren’t volunteering for the “dupe” role anymore. And producers have never been able to earn “real” profits. History may not repeat itself. Will it be a case of oil & gas everywhere, and not a drop to burn?

In writing this I fully understand the implications of doing so. Making this a self fulfilling prophecy is not what I’m intending to do. I am attempting to show the jeopardy we may realize as a result of cementing the established bureaucracy in a term that will last at least the seven years in which SAP will be current, with much longer term consequences. Who will step up after that to assert themselves if People, Ideas & Objects fails in the market, yet the IP of the Preliminary Specification will need to be accounted for in any future solution? And even if there was someone who felt they could provide a better solution, would they be leading their product forward with enhanced performance and accountability in the manner that both Oracle and People, Ideas & Objects were ostracized and vilified for in the past and today?

I also want to clarify, it should not be misunderstood that I’m conceding the point. After 31 years, that’s not even on the table. What I am stating is that the stakes for all concerned will be growing exponentially more difficult in what appears to me to be this next phase of our journey. More difficult for all those associated with People, Ideas & Objects but also for all those who are dependent upon the North American producers in some form. We are heading to what appears to me to be a “quick decision” being made by the producers to adopt SAP based on satisfying their “investors input” much in the manner they adopted investors' clean energy demands. We should ask these producers if those investors that demanded the transition to clean energy ponied up and actively supported these activities. After a year or more I thought there would have been evidence of that by now. That although SAP satisfies the investors general requirement of a tier 1 ERP system. It’s a decision that is made in the best interest of the officers and directors continued, deliberate and destructive lack of profitability and accountability and as with so much of their activities is specious. SAP will also be the least costly in the short term, however far more consequential to the outcome of the industries profitability, accountability and prosperity. To suggest that People, Ideas & Objects may benefit from the decision made from the producer firms is an argument that doesn’t comprehend the value that’s been destroyed by this deliberate bureaucratic sloth and doesn’t understand the relationship People, Ideas & Objects have with producer officers and directors.