9, 10, 11, ... 15, 16

Lets take a moment to review the compelling reasons for users and producers to join People, Ideas & Objects. The point of these is to provide both the understanding of what is possible and what is at stake. The first quarter of 2010 is a time in which we are raising the money necessary to begin development and define the Preliminary Specification. Those producers that are interested in funding these development should follow our Funding Policies & Procedures.

1.    The first reason to join this development is that it is generally agreed to that the easy oil is gone. Exxon has stated that an additional $20 Trillion in capital will be needed over the next 20 years. This does two things. It first identifies a relatively small window of opportunity to reorganize to meet these challenges. Do we believe the bureaucracies are capable of undertaking this increased load? The second thing is that it quantifies the scope of the problem to be larger then anything the industry has faced before. Doing more of the same and faster only leads to running into more problems faster. Organizing for this challenge is captured in the Draft Specification which aligns the industry to this task.

2.    Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) are becoming the key differentiators of software development capability. Firms are achieving 500% increases in productivity by using Agile - Scrum methodologies. People, Ideas & Objects has been conceived under the basis that self organizing teams provides us with advantages over the traditional software houses. We are not applying these principles just to the developers either. Our user communities and the Community of Independent Service Providers will all subscribe to the Complex Adaptive Systems methodology. It is not within our domain, but I would suggest that each and every Joint Operating Committee could achieve sizable performance and productivity gains as a result of pursuing CAS. And if they do, they will have a dedicated software development team and communities that are able to keep up.

3.    You say you want a revolution. That's a good thing. National Public Radio prepared a timely graph that showed where the jobs are going to be in 10 years. Clearly all elements of the work that is being done at People, Ideas & Objects provides the greatest promise of job growth. It's important in this day and age to look at predictions with a healthy dose of scepticism. NPR were using the U.S. Federal Governments Bureau of Labor Statistics, therefore I don't think that much better data can be had.

4.    Being one that has lived the consequences of telling the bureaucracy its redundant, you would think I would have learned the lesson to keep my mouth shut. Unfortunately not. Management is wrong in not making this software development project timely. Their response of shooting the messenger has been typical of the vested interests that are so out of date in today's economy. They have proven to me that they are incapable of falling on their sword and doing the right thing. This is why we appeal to the Investors and shareholders in oil and gas for our funding. Providing them with an alternative means of organizing their oil and gas investments. Recently John Bogle of the Vangaurd Group, Professor Wanda Orlikowski and Professor Carlota Perez cited management is wrong in terms of their motivations and actions.

5.    We have identified a budget of $10 million be raised by the end of March 2010. These funds are not adequate to complete the Preliminary Specification, however, they are a start and are determined to be the most that we would be able to expend in 2010. Funding of the budget by enlightened oil and gas companies, investors and shareholders is the key determinate for the User community and Community of Independent Service Providers to form and commence this work.

6.    In addition to identifying the issues and opportunities that exist in the oil and gas industry. People, Ideas & Objects have developed a strong business model with a significant value proposition for its subscribing producers. Allocating the costs of development over the subscribing base of producers brings value to the industry. The cost-plus method of charging firms $1.00 / barrel of oil equivalent / year may generate upwards of $120 million / year for People, Ideas & Objects developments. At $10 it brings in substantial revenues and continues to be less then 1/10th of a percentile of the producers revenues.

7.    I recently had the opportunity to document the user interface of the People, Ideas & Objects. Our approach has always to deal with the business of the energy business and not to sell the next version of some widget technology. The reason we are moving to the "Synthetic Worlds" and Avatars is that the Draft Specification anticipated this innovation. To make it work we added three "Marketplace" modules where avatars will be able to conduct business virtually. Additionally to enforce the Compliance & Governance Module into this environment we came up with the Military Command & Control Metaphor for the producers in the Joint Operating Committee to remain compliant with the firms governance and compliance needs. All of these are contained within the module specification of Draft Specification. 

8.    Professor Carlota Perez in a recent document that we reviewed declared now is the time in which the Information & Communication Technology Revolution (ICTR) is about to begin. This will be a time of great value generation for the oil and gas producer, the user of People, Ideas & Objects application modules, the Community of Independent Service Providers and society. People want to move forward in these areas and the beginnings of something great is starting to be realized. This is not a short term trend. It is something that will carry our economy for the next 20 - 30 years.

9.    A trend has been noted in the academic community. Since the economy has somewhat stabilized, many papers are being written on how business and industries can build from the recent economic crisis. Clearly these endorse the economic time frame in which change can and should be orchestrated. What needs to happen today is management to be provided with the motivation to get moving and financially support these developments. This academic support should resonate with our identified market for funding. The investors and shareholders in oil and gas companies.

10.    I recently noted how we differed from most Open Source projects. That although we are not technically compliant with any of the Open Source Initiatives licenses, producer firms need to know that they can review, test and ensure the software code they are using meets their needs. I would expect that this will eventually fall within the domain of a proxy for the producers. Some group or team comprised of the Chartered Accounting Firms would probably be able to assure the producers of this on an annual contract.

11.    The Draft Specification is a result of the Preliminary Research Report and many years of research into how and what an application for this new era in oil and gas would look like. Much of this research has been in the area of Transaction Cost Economics. Professor's Richard N. Langlois, Carliss Baldwin and Oliver Williamson have provided the academic strength necessary for an application operating in the oil and gas industry. Transaction Cost Economics research was cited as the reason that Professor Oliver Williamson won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics. It's timely and critical recognition that the energy industry needs to build on these principles. Principles that are a part of the Draft Specification.

12.    Recently we documented the strategies of innovative oil and gas producers. How there focus needs to be on developing their earth science and engineering capabilities within the Joint Operating Committees of which they belong. Application of these capabilities to their asset base is how their competitive advantages are earned and are solely dependent on the uniqueness of their asset base and scientists. People, Ideas & Objects competitive advantage is ensuring that we provide the innovative oil and gas producer with the most profitable means of oil and gas operations.

13.    Oracle have spent a remarkable amount of money, $39 Billion, in configuring their new Fusion MiddleWare application offering. Within these applications it is expected that the energy producer will have to expend additional money in terms of oil and gas features. These costs are unique to the firm and will therefore be incurred by them to provide Oracle a return on their investment in Fusion MiddleWare. This does not address the issues that industry faces today. Issues that I documented in May 2004 in the Preliminary Research Report.

14.    Effective March 31, 2010 we have implemented a penalty structure for those producers who decide to wait while others do the heavy lifting. The penalties are structured to assess any firm that hasn't participated with 300% of the years fees. Therefore any firm that hasn't paid on April 1, 2010 will have to pay $4.00 per barrel of oil equivalent. These fees and penalties are retroactively payable as well. If a firm decides to join the group in 2012, fees and penalties for 2010 and 2011 will also need to paid in full before participation in the communities. It is  recommended that firms participate early as that is the time in which they can assert the greatest impact on the product quality and communities development. Coming in at 2012 will provide little value in terms of how the application and community are able to deal with the unique assets and business' of the producer.

15.    As I write this summary Apple has just announced their first quarter 2010 earnings. Steve Jobs was once asked what he wanted to do in life. His response was that he "wanted to put a ding in the universe". His earnings and Wednesday's announced iTablet may have enabled him to reach his aspirations. Truly spectacular that a company that is worth short of $200 billion can increase its business by 50% in one year. Tech Co. earnings are the proof that the "Sustainable Global Knowledge Society Boom" is here. People in oil and gas should review this project as their means of participating in this fascinating opportunity.

16.    I have been openly critical of Oracle and SAP product offerings. I'm not alone in that criticism. The oil and gas industry is a unique industry that can not be looked at from the perspective of a manufacturer or any other traditional industry classification. It requires a unique approach to its business and the systems that support the firms has to be unique as well. The Draft Specification consistently shows that the means of oil and gas operations, innovativeness, issue resolution and enhanced productivity are within our grasp. The recent Oracle - Sun merger provides us with a unique opportunity to capitalize on their scope and scale capabilities in developing and hosting an application such as People, Ideas & Objects. For the first time I feel excited that we are able to really build something special.

If you are a user that finds these reasons compelling, please join us here. Somehow all these concepts hold together. Imagine that.

Technorati Tags: People's Summary

Perez, Double Bubble trouble

What I am trying to do in this post is to determine exactly where we are in the Information & Communication Technology Revolution. Is it over, are we half done, or is the best still to come. Is it as Professor Carlota Perez suggests a "Sustainable Global Knowledge Society Boom" that we find ourselves in? And if so where are we in terms of that boom? Much of our research in the past six years has been on the faith that Professor Perez' theories would, eventually, become valid. It is now very clear, to me, that she is exactly right. Therefore, where is it precisely that we stand in terms of this Information & Communication Technology Revolution (ICTR) and transition, here in January 2010.

The 35 posts that have been written on Professor Perez' work can be aggregated on this label. I recall reading many times that she did not believe the 2000 dot com meltdown was violent enough to cause people to want to change. She consistently suggested that more would have to happen in the finance area, and that housing would probably be the area that it did show. This going back to at least 2005.

This paper argues that the two boom and bust episodes of the turn of the century—the internet mania and crash of the 1990s and the easy liquidity boom and bust of the 2000s—are two distinct components of a single structural phenomenon. They are essentially the equivalent of 1929 developed in two stages, one centred on technological innovation, the other on financial innovation. Hence, the frequent references to that crash, to the 1930s and toBretton Woods, are not simple journalistic metaphors for interpreting the ‘credit crunch’ and its solution, but rather the intuitive recognition of a fundamental similarity between those events and the current ones. The paper holds that such major boom and bust episodes are endogenous to the way in which the market economy evolves and assimilates successive technological revolutions. It will discuss why it occurred in two bubbles on this occasion; it examines the differences and continuities between the two episodes and presents an interpretation of their nature and consequences. p. 779

1. Introduction

This previous quotation is text that to my mind is the same since we started following her theories. Accurate and prescient. Perez parses down the nature of this dual crash into what she calls Major Technology Bubbles (MTB) and Easy Liquidity Bubbles (ELB). Both are necessary in order to impose the scale of changes necessary to make society move on to the higher value economic order based on, in this case, the Information & Communication Technology revolution (ICTR).

This paper proposes to distinguish major technology bubbles (MTBs) as a special class of bubbles that constitute a recurring endogenous phenomenon, caused by the way the market economy absorbs successive technological revolutions. They are different both in nature and consequence from the bubbles induced by excess liquidity from whatever source and from thePonzi finance moments identified by Minsky. p. 780

and

History has given us the ideal laboratory: an MTB—the 1997–2000 internet mania—followed by the easy liquidity bubble (ELB) of 2004–07. The fact that they took place in rapid succession provides us with clearly comparable and compatible data. Yet it also suggests that they are strongly connected and interrelated. p. 780

In terms of where we stand today, we are overcoming the immediate consequences of both of these market collapses. These phenomena are thankfully "complete" in Professor Perez' mind. Complete in the sense that they do not require any further market collapse in order for the changes be made in the marketplace. If there is no other shoe to drop, we can continue on this journey knowing that the pain will not escalate from here.

2. Major technology bubbles as endogenous phenomena

The computer industry has been profitable, and a major part of our lives for the past 40 years. Are these past 40 years the benefits that we should expect as the effects of theICTR? I hope not. If this were the end of the ICTR we should expect to have our dog food delivered from the fine people at www.pets.com. Not the type of value that I think the Users andCISP need to provide the oil and gas producers.

An MTB is not an accidental event. It regularly occurs midway along the process of assimilation of each technological revolution. It is the paroxystic culmination of 20 or 30 years of market experimentation, centred on new breakthrough technologies and spurred by the extraordinary profits produced by them. p. 780

To think that we are only half way is the news that shows we have a long time left to travel on the ICTR. A specific technology that we are using now is the agile development methodology. One in which the writing of software is up to 500% faster then just a few years ago, a methodology which was substantially faster then the previous iteration. From a development point of view, we are only beginning to develop software much faster and that is much more usable. Reflecting that there is more to come from theICTR. 

The ensuing collapse not only results in the return to more sensible real values and a reconnection with the real economy; it also signals the end of a period when financial capital is in control of investment to a period in which control passes over to production capital. p. 780

As Perez predicted, financial capital grew too large in terms of its share of the global economy. With not enough work to do, they found ways to amuse themselves and the consequences are reflected in today's economy. Perez had consistently stated that financial capital would recede to be replaced by "production" capital to fuel the remainder of theICTR.

The process follows a basic stable sequence: irruption of the revolution, two or three decades of a turbulent installation period ending in a major bubble collapse, then arecomposition of the socio -institutional framework that regulates finance and sets the conditions for the final deployment period, a time of more organic growth that lasts until maturity and exhaustion are reached, setting the stage for the irruption of the next technological revolution (Perez, 2002 [2003], 2007). p. 781

Perez is clear how this will happen.

It is because of human resistance to change and organisational inertia in existing institutions that the introduction and diffusion of the new technologies and their best practices has to be forced by ferocious competition and by the high profit pressures imposed by the stock market. p. 781

Review of the ideas that comprise the Draft Specification. The strategy and business model of this software development. The User and CISP focus on creating a community, having that community direct the development of the software. Are all built upon using the Joint Operating Committee as the key organizational construct of the innovative oil and gas producer. Producers that join us will have a higher level of performance vs. those that remain in their current form. Software firms such as SAP and Oracle will have difficulty meeting the demands of an innovative producer. Competition in both the performance of the producer and the systems that support them will be the means in which change is exercised.

From the confrontation between them will emerge the novel leaders and the industries that will serve as engines of growth of the economy. At the same time, the experience in using the new technologies, especially the new infrastructures, will result in a different set of best practice principles for efficiency—a new techno-economic paradigm—applicable to all other industries and serving to overcome maturity and increase productivity across the whole economy through more efficient equipment, better organisational models and much wider market reach. p. 781

So competition is how the benefits of the Information Technology Revolution (ITR) come about. When will this happen?

2.3 The unwitting role of the MTB

Did we miss it? Are we too late, or too early? Here is where I think some confusion is a natural course of the events we have been through. There are two boom bust cycles occurring at the same time. We are finishing off the Deployment phase of the WWII boom driven by the age of the automobiles, oil and petrochemicals. And secondly transitioning from the Installation to the Deployment phase of theICTR.

Technology has been a big part of the problem. Over building the worlds fiber optic networks was a large part of the demise of many companies on the NASDAQ exchange. This was necessary, but also not part of the real advantages that society would garner. Those advantages would occur as the existing industries used the fiber optic cable in new and innovative ways. 

So that is how the market system revitalises the economy every half century or so. When a set of new technologies reaches exhaustion of products, productivity increase and markets (as mass production did in the late 1960s and early 1970s), financial capital abandons its old clients and joins the new entrepreneurs, giving strong support to technologies that had been in gestation for years but limited by the prevailing paradigm (Perez, 2002 [2003], pp. 27–32). The financial success of this process leads to theMTB , which not only intensifies the full experimentation with the new technologies and the modernisation of most industries, but also fosters over-investment in the new infrastructures. p. 789

What Professor Perez is saying is that their can't be "not enough fiber optic networks". There can only be too many or none at all.

These usually need to reach full coverage to be effective and thus require high up-front investment and take time to become profitable. It is the switch to short-term gains during the bubble that attracts the necessary capital to be poured into the infrastructural networks of each revolution. p. 789

Google, Apple, Oracle and Cisco are new-era companies that became household names in the run up to the dot com meltdown. Perez suggests these firm make for a new and necessary aspect of the modernization of the economy.

When the boom and bust of the MTB mark the end of this installation period, most of the economy has been modernised, ample coverage of the new infrastructure is in place and new corporate giants are ready to lead the expansion by taking full advantage of the new potential. But by this time, the financial world will have acquired the habit of being in control of investment and of getting constant high returns. Quarterly profits will have become the main measure and production companies will find themselves forced to avoid long term projects and to constantly deliver short term gains. For this reason, the golden age of more harmonious growth—or deployment period—that follows in the last two or three decades of each surge of development will depend on the capacity of the State to restrain the financial casino that typifies the bubble and to hand over power to production capital, allowing its longer term horizons to guide investment once more. This has usually involved changes in the financial architecture and in the incentive structure of investment. pp. 789 - 790

We see a clear definition of the time frame that we are in. New leaders have established themselves. The MTB and ELB have occured. The installation and overbuilding of the networks and technologies to drive the future. The continued pressure to performance based on quarterly earnings. The need for financial reform, hopefully only started last week. Everything that is difficult seems to be behind us. The harmonious growth of the golden age is upon us and we will use these technologies to the benefit of society, people and organizations. 

On this occasion, such regulatory and institutional changes have had to wait until the collapse of a second, much greater and more global boom and bust. p. 790

These points are clear in Professor Perez' writings, what is different this time, to the four other great surges, is that it occured in a two step process, the dot com meltdown and the financial crash of 2008.

5.2 The double bubble and the full consequences

The unique characteristic of having two bubbles collapsing has consequences of its own.

What came after the internet bubble collapse was not the restructuring of the real economy that tends to occur in the aftermath but a casino revival that only fulfilled part of that task. p. 800

and

After the meltdown of this second bubble, the actors in the real economy—both producers and consumers—see themselves as the direct victims of the false promises of the casino and its disastrous consequences. Finance has done its job and overstayed its welcome at the helm of investment; it is time for production capital to take over and to fully unleash across the world the wealth-creating potential already installed. This will require governments to once again design appropriate policies and provide the general guidelines. pp. 800 - 801

Right here, right now. This is where People, Ideas & Objects and the Community of Independent Service Providers, the user groups and the innovative oil and gas producer all fit. Now is the time to begin this journey and build the applications defined in the Draft Specification. That is what is at stake, and that is the opportunity.

Nevertheless, the conditions are not necessarily all set for this change. Several authors have pointed out that finance has come to dominate the economy to an extent that could be termed ‘financialisation’ (see Arrighi, 1994; Dore, 2008; Krippner, 2005; van Treeck, 2009) and that this constitutes a fundamental change in the market economy. p. 801

This last point doesn't necessarily apply directly to these communities. However it is interesting to see that these technology giants, Oracle, Apple, Cisco and Google do not see their enhanced role in the economy.

On the other hand, the emerging leaders of the new production capital, the new ICT giants that would serve as engines of growth of the world economy and shape the deployment period, are yet to recognise and wield their power and influence in the course of events, nationally and globally. If in the fourth surge the chief of General Motors could rightly say that what was good for GM was good for the USA and viceversa; today the global ICT companies could say that what is good for them is good for the world economy. Yet they do not seem to be questioning the leadership of finance or vying for a place at the top. Whatever their participation, the outcome will be resolved in the political arena. p. 802

What's good for Apple or Oracle or Google or Cisco is good for the economy.

6. Conclusion: the special nature of MTBs and the policy challenge

The fundamental implication of the interpretation presented here is that what we are facing is not just a financial crisis but rather the end of a period and the need for a structural shift in social and economic context to allow for continued growth under this paradigm. Both globalisation and national prosperity will depend upon and be shaped by the longterm solutions implemented to face the challenges posed by the current recession. p. 803

If you are an investor or shareholder that would like to participate in this new economy and support the development of these applications, please follow our Funding Policy & Procedures. And if you are a user that would like to be involved in building these applications or become a member of the Community of Independent Service Providers please join us here.

Technorati Tags: People's Perez Community CISP Innovation

And we're back

Something happened in the blog that caused the "Post Pages" feature of the blog to fail. I have turned that feature off and if you now select any individual post, it will render. A related problem was occuring with the comments feature. That too has been remedied. Selecting another post within a post will not render and this is being worked on. Those accessing content through a reader are redirected to a interim page that will let you click through to the current post. Please resume normal reading patterns. ;)

Complex Adaptive Systems

Today I'm opening a new line of research in this blog. We are now turning the corner and beginning the process of becoming an organization that builds the application defined in the Draft Specification. Back as far as May 2004, in the Preliminary Research Report, self-organizing teams have been part of this software development project. Not just the software developers, the self-organizing and adaptive team concepts are being applied to the User groups and the Community of Independent Service Providers. With this post I'll begin aggregating this research on the "Agile / Scrum" Technorati Tag, and Label.

Why do we want to do this? I am of the belief that the software code that defines and supports the innovative oil and gas producer will never be static. Constant change and improvement are a necessary underlying requirement of supporting the earth science and engineering capabilities of the oil and gas producer. A producer may discover through using the many Marketplace modules; other ways of doing things that are more effective. Just because this new method may be a 10 fold increase in the way things were done before, doesn't mean that another doubling isn't just around the corner. A committed software developer and user community is a cornerstone of the innovative oil and gas producer, and what People, Ideas & Objects is structured to achieve.

Another reason we are doing "Complex Adaptive Systems" (CAS) is the fact that the scope and scale of the application modules is beyond what can be achieved in the traditional ways of organization. Add to that the demands of the energy marketplace will soon outstrip what the producers can deliver. There will soon be the need for an acceleration in performance of the oil and gas industry, that is multiples of today's performance. If engineering and earth sciences required $1.00 per barrel of oil in 1997 they may need $15.00 today and $40 in the very near future. Much of this may be solved through faster computers, the point is weather your using a slide rule or a supercomputer the volume of engineering, and earth sciences is fixed and growing, logarithmically.

We see today's pricing of oil and gas supports this growing technical requirement. I am not of the opinion that management of oil and gas companies are even concerned about this issue. They have been able to increase revenues and profits for the past 5 years on the basis of doing nothing. Their actions have put us behind the eight ball in terms of delivering this software in a reasonable time frame. It is needed now, and they are all the wealthier by messing things up for the world economy.

Complex Adaptive Systems is a team concept that has enabled the software teams to approach 500% increases in performance, and there will be more in the near future. Applying these concepts to the design and architecture of the Users and CISP will provide similar metrics. And yes, I see the Joint Operating Committee being the Complex Adaptive System that it is. Having an industry operate on these principles is what is required to supply the world with the energy to fulfill what is possible. If your an investor or shareholder in oil and gas and wish to support financially these teams, please join us here. And if your a user that sees this type of application providing the solution to the industry, please join us here.

Technorati Tags: People's Agile-Scrum Development CISP User

Keep an eye on the...

First, I continue to have difficulties with rendering individual pages. This occurs when any other post is selected from the text within a post, the blog archive to the left and through a reader. I continue to work on this problem and please excuse the bug. To access the content on the blog you'll need to go to http://innovation-in-oil-and-gas.blogspot.com. (I also want to highlight yesterday's post of McKinsey video of Jim Wallis again, as I don't think it rendered properly within the feed readers.)

This next week we are moving into the busiest part of the technological companies 2009 full year earnings. Keep an eye on the leaders in the Information Technology space, Apple, Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft and Google. All of these firms, due to the industry that they are in will be reporting spectacular earnings. Google reported on Thursday that their advertising revenues were up and earnings were up at spectacular levels for the quarter. Not bad for an economy that barely functions otherwise.

These earnings are important to show the Users, Producers and members of the Community of Independent Service Providers (CISP) that People, Ideas & Objects is the real growth area of the economy. Last year Professor Carlota Perez published a number of papers that I am in the middle of reviewing. Clearly she has been exactly right in terms of where we are in this economic transformation. Everything that she has been saying for many years is in play and these will be highlighted in my review of her papers.

People don't want to change if there is no need to. The times today show that the industries that benefited from the last 70 years, the era of energy, are challenged not by there demise. Oil and gas will be around for hundreds of years. They are being challenged on the basis of their organizational structure which must change in order to compete. Those that don't follow on with the necessary changes will be left behind. What Perez is showing here is that there are two types of firms in today's economy. The Apples, Google's and Cisco's in new industries that are necessary to bring on the new technologies. And the old industry businesses that need to re-organize in order to become more competitive based on the new Information & Communication Technologies.

National Public Radio published a graph that shows where the future jobs, and in which industries, growth will occur. The graph is based on data from U.S. Bureau of labor Statistics. Although it is difficult to predict what the future will be in these fast changing times. The contrasts are stark. What Professor Perez has shown us is that good data in the hands of a very good researcher can provide a strong road map. Society owes much to Professor Perez.

Professional & Business Service                           +23.3%

Impressive jobs growth but looking into the subcategories of Professional & Business Service shows where and how the Users and CISP will find their skills in high, very high demand.

Scientific Research & Development Services           +25.3%
Computer Systems Design & Related Services         +45.3%
Management Scientific &
                    Technical Consulting Services             +82.8%

Conversely the Natural Resources,
                    Construction & Utilities                     +11.9%

People, Ideas & Objects has followed Professor Perez since 2005. We are in the mode of providing the oil and gas producers with the new way to organize around the Joint Operating COmmitte, the natural form of organization of all producers. If your a Producer that wants to participate in this new era of oil and gas, please join us here. And if your a user who would like to participate, please join us here.

Technorati Tags: People's CISP Change Technology Perez

Open Source, with a twist.

Although People, Ideas & Objects is a project that subscribes to many of the principles of open source software. We don't qualify under any of the currently existing Open Source Initiatives approved licenses. My two concerns regarding this project are that the ability to run the binary of the applications be limited to People, Ideas & Objects exclusively. I am also concerned with the industries desire and behavior of parsing "opportunities" to have multiple companies "compete" for the crumbs they leave for service providers in the oil and gas industry. These competitive strategies have left all of the power in the hands of the bureaucracy as to what and when a project will get funded, implemented and deployed in the oil and gas industry. Name a good oil and gas accounting or ERP application in the market space and you'll see the results of the oil and gas industries micro management of the software vendors. This 1950's style of management is inappropriate for the oil and gas companies to continue. They have enough to do in this new age of costly energy to be concerned with the competitive makeup of any of their service industry providers. Please see the Resource Marketplace Module for further information on how this is handled in the People, Ideas & Objects application.

However, in order to provide the security and stability of the application it needs to be subjected to as many "eye-balls" as possible. This provides the innovative oil and gas producer with assurance that there is no inappropriate code contained within the application. What "our" license will provide is the ability to inspect, test and review the code, but not to run the binary.

At this point in time, lets also be clear of how the application binary will be provided to the innovative producers. The cloud computing concept is in its infancy, but I see no other way then to run an application of this size any other way other then on the cloud. Oracle has recently termed the phrase "industry in a box" and that applies clearly to the application modules of People, Ideas & Objects. The size of this application may have several thousand members of the Community of Independent Service Providers and multiples of this being their employees, millions of users, tens of thousand of producers, hundreds of thousands of Joint Operating Committee's and tens of thousands of service industry firms.

An application of this size can not be undertaken by multiple vendors. The intellectual property that supports the Draft Specification is a result of my six years of dedicated 14 hours per day of research. To come up with a competitive offering someone is going to have to come up with a different hypothesis and build it through research such that it solves the industry problems in similar ways that the People, Ideas & Objects Draft Specification does. This too will take them six years and will have to be done by people who are sworn not to have, or will ever, read any of the material in the Preliminary Research Report, Draft Specification and this blog. Good luck.

Clearly the ability of the industry to sponsor multiple applications like People, Ideas & Objects is not within what could be practically done in the time frames available to them. No doubt management will attempt to do so, and I wish them good luck. Focusing the energies on this one project will be a challenge for all concerned. Diluting our efforts with competing alternatives will only cause the industry to expend more cash and time. This is primarily due to the fact that an innovative oil and gas producer does not garner any competitive advantage from using their ERP system. People, Ideas & Objects focus is to provide the innovative producer with the most profitable means of oil and gas operations.

It is however, not the basis of whether the producer will earn any profits. Their profits are based on focusing their energies on applying their ever increasing scientific and engineering capability toward their unique and mutually exclusive asset base. People, Ideas & Objects provides this natural way of operations but cannot take credit for a producer being profitable when it has nothing to do with the science or assets of the producer firm. What I can assure the innovative producer is that whatever the decisions and assets look like, using People, Ideas & Objects will ensure these assets earn the most profits then either SAP or Oracle. That is People, Ideas & Objects competitive offering.

I am pleased to note that yesterday Sun and Oracle have received European approval for their merger / acquisition. Sun has been our hardware and software (Solaris, Java, NetBeans, GlassFish and others) vendor. Now with Oracle being part of the mix, its important to note that the two technologies of theirs that are being added to this project. The first is the Oracle Database, the place where I was indoctrinated on relational theory, and Oracle Coherence. We will not be using any of the Fusion Middle Ware products and as such are able to maintain the blank slate approach to this most unique of industries, oil and gas.

Oracle and I have a bad history together. They are single-handily responsible for much of the management of the applications intellectual property in this fashion. In 1993 we signed a comprehensive agreement to jointly develop oil and gas systems for Canadian producers. In 1997, after expending mine and others capital, Oracle Energy was announced. We chose to move to make our applications operate with Price Waterhouses oil and gas applications and said good bye to the likes of Oracle. Oracle Energy was quietly put six feet under in 2000. So here we stand, again.

If there is an opportunity to resurrect the 1993 agreement between Oracle and People, Ideas & Objects, I'm there. An application of this scope needs the resources of Oracle to be a fundamental aspect of its deliver-ability, reliability, accessibility and security. The only thing I would ask Oracle to make this happen is they recognize the market space of the energy marketplace is People, Ideas & Objects. Provide me with some compensation for their activities in 1993 to 1997, and together we can make this real.

Oracle stands to earn significant revenues and profits from the licensing of Java, Databases, Computer sales, service and support. IBM also wants this business, however, I feel the market is best served by Oracle and expect that they are the most capable. Oracle, here is my email address. If I here from you before March 31, 2010 the business is possibly yours.

This is why we are Open Source with a twist. For more information on Open Source and its benefits, please review this recent Sun interview. If these strategies resonate with your firm, please support these developments here. If your a user, or maybe want to be come part of the Community of Independent Service Providers, please join us here.

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McKinsey, A Conversation With Jim Wallis

In the Preliminary Research Report Professor's Anthony Giddens Structuration theory was reviewed alongside Professor Wanda Orlikowski's Structurational Model of Technology. These suggest that organizations, people and society move together or there is failure. In May of 2004 this appeared to me that the organizations were failing both people and society and that as a result, failure of one of the three components (people, society or organizations) would occur. The financial crisis is the failure of the organizations. They have failed in so many ways it is difficult to list them all. Until today.

McKinsey have an unbelievably good video that deals with this topic. People are angry and do not want to see things continue in the fashion that they are. This is captured in this video very elequently. Enjoy!



Technorati Tags: People's McKinsey Change Orlikowski Code-of-Conduct Community Leadership

McKinsey, Competing Through Organizati...

This is a follow on post to Professor Don Sull's video. Scroll down to the blog entry for December 21, 2009 entitled "McKinsey, Strategy Through Turbulence". My apologies for the continued technical difficulties. I have opened the root page of the blog to show the last 100 posts. Individual posts will not render. I believe it has something to do with changes that Google made to Blogger-in-Draft which appear to be on their radar. Until this is fixed please use only http://innovation-in-oil-and-gas.blogspot.com.

In the closing two paragraphs of this document, Professor Sull states the following.

A downturn brings hard choices into stark relief, provides an external rationale to justify difficult decisions, and offers “air cover” with external stakeholders (including investors and directors) to reverse previous decisions. In the current market, senior executives should consolidate their major initiatives into a single list and make the hard choices needed to select a handful that are truly critical. To ensure that everyone gets the message, they should communicate the priorities throughout the entire organization, along with a list of initiatives that are no longer key objectives, to ensure that people do not waste resources on unimportant matters.

To suggest that the oil and gas industry hasn't changed in the last decade would be a fairy tale. Revenues have escalated to 400% currently, and peaked at over 700% of what they were a few short years ago. Now costs of oil and gas operations and capital investment are following the same pattern. Those that are able to remain agile and innovative are being rewarded with higher cash flows and most importantly higher profits. We will soon see what the earnings of the bureaucratic firms look like for all of 2009. I think then the writing will be on the wall to do something about it.

In many ways doing "more" has failed. Drilling more wells then the previous year did nothing to increase the reserve life index. Its time to take stock of what the approach will be for the next 20 years. If Exxon is correct that there will be an extra $20 trillion in capital invested in the next 20 years, then this time horizon is what we should focus on. Addressing the systems that identify and support the Joint Operating Committee are proven in this research to provide the value necessary for producers to succeed in this harsh environment.

As Professor Don Sull notes this economic downturn provides "air cover" to the management to do something to affect the culture of the company. Realigning the Tax, Royalty and SEC frameworks of the bureaucracy with the cultural, financial, legal, operational decision making and communication frameworks of the Joint Operating Committee. This change will increase accountability and innovation which I believe is why management have fought so hard to eliminate People, Ideas & Objects from the marketplace. Why work when the revenues are so handsome and we look so good. I think these "good old days" are ending and they may need the cover that Professor Sully talks about.

One final thought: economic crises can provide an ideal opportunity to invigorate the cultural transformation that is often needed to cultivate operational agility. For example, in the transition from good South Korean player to great global company, Samsung Electronics made most of its progress during the global recession of the early 1990s and the “Asian contagion” of 1997. Senior executives used these crises to renew a sense of urgency, justify unpopular decisions, and overcome complacency or resistance to change. Focusing on culture is critical because outexecuting rivals time and time again requires constant injections of urgency, effort, and enthusiasm. A performance-oriented culture helps induce such effort.

In my January 10, 2010 post I documented the comments of Mr. John Bogle, Professor Carlota Perez and Professor Wanda Orlikowski. These people were making the same point as Professor Sull is in the above quote. These also mirror the experiences that I have had in People, Ideas & Objects. Strong academic and sound business advise for management to get out of the way. The longer they take to begin these difficult processes the harder it will be for them to change. If your a shareholder or investor in oil and gas and believe that the industry would be better served by having the Draft Specification and Community of Independent Service Providers built, please join us here. And if your a user, please join us here.

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Technical difficulties with individual posts.

Hello,

I am aware that individual posts, when selected from the blog archive to the left, or within text of other blog posts are not rendering any text or post specific information. Individual labels are working. I am working to fix this problem as soon as possible.

In the meantime, I have increased the "root" page from 15 posts to 100. Loading times are increased, however, more current posts will be able to be displayed. I apologize for any inconvenience.

Paul

Professor Baldwin and von Hipple VI

To finish off the review of Professor Carliss Baldwin and Professor Eric von Hipple's paper "Modelling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaborative Innovation". I feel it is appropriate to highlight just the final paragraph of the document. It speaks to all that we are working to do for the oil and gas industry.

We conclude by observing again that we believe we are in the midst of a major paradigm shift: technological trends are causing a change in the way innovation gets done in advanced market economies. As design and communication costs exogenously decline, single user and open collaborative innovation models will be viable for a steadily wider range of design. They will present an increasing challenge to the traditional paradigm of producer-based design – but, when open, they are good for social welfare and should be encouraged.

Please join us here.

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John Bogle on Accountability

The Wall Street Journal has an op-ed written by John C. Bogle, Founder and Former Chief Executive Officer of Vangaurd Group.

In a recent post covering Professor Wanda Orlikowski's paper, I documented the difficulty I have had with management of oil and gas companies. Suggesting in the Preliminary Research Report that they used the knowledge that software defines and supports organizations, therefore, you need to build the software first. As the means to ensure that they would never be challenged by never sponsoring software of the nature of People, Ideas & Objects. This was also intimated by Professor Orlikowski, will be documented in an upcoming post of Professor Carlota Perez and mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article today.

Professor Orlikowski states:

Confronted with synthetic worlds, these researchers will in all probability focus their attention elsewhere. And this choice has consequences for the value of organizational scholarship: "to the extent that the management literature continues to overlook the ways in which organizing is critically bound up with material forms and spaces, our understanding of organizational life will remain limited at best, and misleading at worst' (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008, p. 466).

Professor Carlota Perez states:

Organizational inertia is a well known phenomenon of human and social resistance to change. In the market economy, however, inertia is overcome by competition, which, by showing the direction of success, serves as a guide to best practice and as a survival threat to the laggards.

And Mr. Bogle notes

In short, far too many of our corporate and financial agents have failed to honor the interests of their principals—the mutual fund investors and pension beneficiaries to whom they owed a fiduciary duty. The ramifications were widespread—for the failure of money managers to observe the principles of fiduciary duty played a major role in allowing our corporate managers to place their own interests ahead of the interests of their shareholders.

All of these points are related and mirror my experiences in People, Ideas & Objects over the past six years. It is time for the energy investors and shareholders to get behind this software development project for their own purposes. People, Ideas & Objects provides a means for the energy shareholder to manage their oil and gas assets. Management are wrong and conflicted in making these decisions to support their personal positions. Mr. Bogle suggests the time is now "Then, I found few allies. Today, perhaps, this is an idea whose time has come." They have a fiduciary duty to their owners to do what is right. As Professor Perez notes, competition eventually solves this problem. It is therefore time to choose if your oil and gas company will be a leader or a laggard. 

If you are interested in People, Ideas & Objects, please consider funding our 2010 budget. If you are a user who knows there is a better way to organize in oil and gas, please join me here.

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And that would make eight.

In summarizing the eight compelling reasons for getting involved in this project.

The first compelling reason is, oil and gas has moved into a more complex and difficult environment(s). Technically, financially, politically and logistically to name just a few. These environments require producers to make more decisions, and the companies can not keep up. Review a firms Reserve Life Index and you will see the extent of this problem. Exxon has valued this increased complexity at an increment of $1 trillion more in capital expenditures per year over the next 20 years. Let be me clear, I want Exxon to fully participate in these developments.

The second is the response of the ERP vendors. There is a storied history between SAP and the industry & Oracle and the industry. Not a lot of love there. Such that, any opportunity to address the above point, People, Ideas & Objects, thankfully for the Community of Independent Service Providers (CISP), is the only solution. If the others can't see the problem, then they'll only waste money in building a solution. Oh wait, Oracle has already spent $39 billion in research and acquisition costs in bringing Oracle Fusion to market. If you want your company to be the one that keeps Oracle's return on investment positive, I wish you the best.

Third, much of People, Ideas & Objects extensive research that went into the Draft Specification was based on Professor's Williamson's, Langlois' and Baldwin's research in Transaction Cost Economics. This critical area of research earned Professor Oliver Williamson the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics. Showing that the Draft Specification has a basis in strong academic research. This grounding in leading edge research is the foundation of which the users and CISP will use to design the Preliminary Specification.

Fourth, since the economy did not tank and we can build on what remains. Academics have turned to organizations, technology and innovation as their key areas of research. This will have substantial benefits to the user community and Community of Independent Service Providers involved in People, Ideas & Objects software applications.

These compelling reasons are being marketed to the investors and shareholders of the producer firms. They are the ones that are being called upon to fund, or direct their oil and gas companies to fund, our 2010 $10 million budget for the beginnings of the Preliminary Specification. The user community needs to see the commitment of the producers to begin to step up in this difficult and opportune time. I also expect Shell, BP, Chevron, Total, Devon, Chesapeake, Saudi-Aramco, Pemex, and Petronas, to name just a few, to contribute to the 2010 budget and the future requirements. They can't play in the game if they don't pay the fee to get into the ball park. That is to say, the benefits to producers is getting involved early and often. Making organizational change requires that the software gets built first, otherwise the existing sophistication in terms of division of labor, the complexity and capability of the markets will be lost. Not everyone will be able to join us, I expect the laggards are too busy with their problems, which will only lead to their unfortunate demise.

A sixth point is the compelling value proposition provided to the user community and the producers themselves in this software development project.

Seventh, I recently had the opportunity to detail a gaping whole in the Draft Specification, the User Vision. I am pleased that I can forcefully put these points across and not be belittled by managements perception that it's a toy. Professor Orlikowski's research came at an opportune time to build real value to this project and fill out our previously un-spoken user-vision of the People, Ideas & Objects application modules.

I recently noted two new papers from Professor Carlota Perez are to be reviewed in the very near future. What is stated in those papers is that the real value of the Information Technology Revolution is about to begin in earnest. This trend is expected to continue for the next 20 years and provide a ground floor business opportunity for our CISP, and, subscribing producers.

If your a producer that wants to benefit from these developments, and support the team financially, please review our Funding Policies & Procedures. Or your a user that wants to contribute to these developments, please join us here.

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Professor Wanda Orlikowski's Technology in Management

A recent post suggested that there was a hesitancy in detailing too much about the user interface to be used in the People, Ideas & Objects application modules. Firstly, this design process that we are undertaking in the Preliminary Specification is about the oil and gas business, not about the new(er) technologies that have been developed. And this post is not so much about the technologies but how the user will interact with the modules being developed here. The interface, as Apple & Google have shown us time and again, is the critical piece in how people use their technologies. [Please stay with me for the full post as this requires some reader faith.]

Back in the dot com bubble much was made of the "Exchanges" that were being built. The market cap for these companies were in the billions and they would prosper through building the technology to facilitate exchanges of documents etc. Thankfully that era ended and we never saw these technologies get picked up. However, today the concept of exchanges is developing again. And they will fail. That is why they do not appear anywhere in the Draft Specification. What does appear are Marketplaces. Places where the people and technology live together in perfect harmony. Creative license is a treasure.

The hesitancy in posting about this is due to the fact that I see the People, Ideas & Objects user interface being exactly like the World ofWarcraft (WoW) user interface. Now that the non-believers have left we can speak to the advantages of this. If you've never seen WoW ask a teenager, actually any teenager, to look at their version of the game. It's brilliant. Note how the environmental variables, and pretty much anything can be accessed through small groupings of control panels. Each provides the user with the control needed to operate the game.



and



Just search YouTube for World of Warcraft and you'll be able to see the analogy I am trying to make here. Professor Wanda Orlikowski defines a term in her paper "Synthetic Worlds". In the Draft Specification there are at least four "Synthetic Worlds" that I want to quickly mention.

1. Any and all Joint Operating Committees oil and gas assets.
2. Petroleum Lease Marketplace Module
   
3. Financial Marketplace Module
   
4. Resource Marketplace Module
   

Each of these are Synthetic Worlds populated with the User defined environment. Each facility or oil and gas property is populated with a virtual representation. If a rig was drilling a new well, then the Synthetic World would emulate the actual activities on the rig. [Look to the Technical Vision of this project to understand how that happens.] Importantly, the interactions between people and their avatars, and other avatars, are supported by the design elements that can negotiate a contract, and design a transaction to have a fracing company come in and double the number of horizontal fracs based on what was discovered down hole.

The Petroleum Lease Marketplace might appear like an old "exchange" [bad word] where people are buying and selling. But in this instance it's oil and gas leases. And maybe their not buying or selling but pooling their interests with their neighbors to ensure they get approved for the gas plant they want to build. A producer may be selling off it's none core assets. A young engineer is looking for support to fund his dream of turning the Basal Quartz into the most prolific zone ever. These, all being in real time with people in the marketplace.

The Financial Marketplace module will handle the financial resources of the producers. If you don't like the billing you received from the previously mentionedfracing company, engage them in a virtual private meeting regarding resolution. Interestingly so, since were emulating real life virtually, we are also recording it, making it easy for the producer to show why thefracing costs are incorrectly billed.

The Resource Marketplace module where an oil and gas producer can find any type of service operation from the Community of Independent Service Providers, the service sector vendors like the fracing company mentioned, the employees the firms want to hire. All provided in a Synthetic World. 

Now that I have provided full and complete certainty to my detractors, is this possible? Here we have Dr. Eric Schmidt who was the president of Sun Microsystems at one time, also CEO ofNovell at one time and has been the CEO of Google for the past 10 years has to say about Synthetic Worlds.

Everything in the future online is going to look like a multi-player game,” said Schmidt to this international audience. “If I were 15 years old, that’s what I would be doing right now.

In answer to those questions is it possible? Please refer back to the videos earlier. That rich of an environment has been in the game players world for the past number of years. Critically here is where Professor WandaOrlikowski pick up her research. Note that her discussion is based on the Sun Microsystems "Java" (imagine that) environment known as Project Wonderland. An "Open Source" (imagine that) development framework for business' to implement these technologies. Please see the Sun research documents here, here and here. And watch this video of Project Wonderland.



Before we get to Professor Orlikowski research I want to put one more critical aspect of the Draft Specification into play. The Military Command & Control Metaphor is a critical aspect of the Compliance & Governance Module and how things can work in the appropriate business sense. To suggest that anyone and everyone have access to a game players type of situation is ridiculous. The need to implement a key part of the organizations compliance and governance needs to be available. When we add that the JOC is representative of many producers we add an element that makes this scenario of a Synthetic World impossible. Add the layering of the Security & Access Control Module and the Military Command & Control Module in the Draft Specification, the problem is solved. The only requirement that I think we need to add is a means to visually identify the appropriate role and rank of each individual in the Synthetic World. [I'm thinking Star Trek Shirts with different colors and badges, oops there's my detractors again.] So that the representative from the fracing company can see that the avatar of the individual he is negotiating the contract with does have the authority to execute on behalf of the producer and the JOC.

One more paragraph and were at Professor Orlikowski's research. John Hagel posted an entry on how relationships and dynamics in the work place. His comments add another perspective to the discussion.

Professor Orlikowski's Abstract states;

Drawing on a specific scenario from a contemporary workplace, I review some of the dominant ways that management scholars have addressed technology over the past five decades. I will demonstrate that while materiality is an integral aspect of organizational actively, it has either been ignored by management research or investigated through an ontology of separateness that cannot account for the multiple and dynamic ways in which the social and the material areconstitutively entangled in everyday life. I will end by pointing to some possible alternative perspectives that may have the potential to help management scholars take seriously the distributed and complexsociomaterial configurations that form and perform contemporary organizations.

Commenting on the scenario that is best represented in the last YouTube video above, Orlikowski states:

A normal day at the office for a software development team? Not quite. I have omitted an important detail. The Project Wonderland rooms, offices screens, and documents are part of an online, three-dimensional,immersive environment for workplace collaboration within Sun Microsystems, known as MPK 20. Within this graphically intensive virtual workplace, users interact in real time using audio, text and images, and they share applications and content from a variety of online sources.

In answer to the many of Professor Orlikowski's questions; people use marketplaces for everything. The marketplace is the boiling pot of research into the capitalist system. A system of organization and activity that everyone subscribes to.

The use of synthetic worlds for organizational activities such as distributed collaboration raises interesting questions for scholars --  how to make sense of a study of these in management research? What are some existing perspectives that might usefully be drawn on to do so? What new or alternative perspectives might be more relevant? What are the implications of choosing certain perspectives over others in accounting for and articulating particular issues and insights?

2. Established perspectives on technology in management research

Professor Anthony Giddens Structuration Theory was used in the preliminary research report. His theory identifies that People, Organizations and Society move in lock step with one another. If there is a difference in the pace of change of these three elements, a failure occurs. As I indicated in a recent post, ProfessorOrlikowski "Structurational Model of Technology" was used in the Preliminary Research Report to determine that society and technology are linked by "the duality of technology" and the "interpretive flexibility of technology". Please see the Preliminary Research Report for further application to the energy industry. The majority of Professor Orlikowski's work has been in these areas.

Three distinctive conceptual positions on technology are clearly evident in the management literature of the past few decades. In the first perspective, which I will characterize as absent presence, technology is essentially unacknowledged by organizational researchers and thus unaccounted for in their studies. In the second perspective, technology is posited to be an exogenous force -- a powerful driver of history having determinate impacts on organizational life. The third perspective, that of emergent process, technology is positioned as a product of ongoing human interpretations and interactions, and thus as contextually and historically contingent.

The value she has created with her ideas is in this fourth perspective of technology. What she in essence says is that dealing with organizations and technologies as separates, management research has to deal with them as one. This is the area of research that the Preliminary Research Report was able to determine that to change organizations, the technology or ERP system should be designed and built to identify and support the Joint Operating Committee. It is also the area where the management of the oil and gas companies, my detractors if you will, have used these ideas against themselves. Suggesting that they would not be challenged in their positions if the technology never changed. These ideas and their implication provide the support I need to appeal to the shareholders and investors in oil and gas to take thisperversion of Professor Orlikowski's work away from the management and eliminate them.

Recently, a fourth perspective of technology -- that of entanglement in practice -- has attracted interest within management research, largely influenced by longer-standing development in sociology and science and technology studies (Barad, 2003; Latour, 2005; Suchman, 2007). As I will describe below, this alternative perspective entails a commitment to a relational ontology that undercuts the dualism that has characterized but also limited much of the prior technology research in management studies. In particular, this perspective offers the potential to radically re-conceptualize our notions of technology and reconfigure our understandings of contemporary organizational life.

I believe it is very clear that the threat to management by technology has been significant and it is human nature for them to resist. I think the Project Wonderland, People, Ideas & Objects marketplace models and the many other supporting conditions prove that the technology will eliminate management. And it is the responsibility of people and society to ensure that organizations change to ensure they do not continue to hold everything back.

5. Conclusion

Professor Orlikowski sees the aberrant way in which management have approached technology. In her conclusion she intimates that management will continue to forestall the adoption of further research.

Confronted with synthetic worlds, these researchers will in all probability focus their attention elsewhere. And this choice has consequences for the value of organizational scholarship: "to the extent that the management literature continues to overlook the ways in which organizing is critically bound up with material forms and spaces, our understanding of organizational life will remain limited at best, and misleading at worst' (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008, p. 466).

Orlikowski shows us the way's and means to implement these technologies.

They will conclude, as I do here, by suggesting that the perspective of entanglement may be particularly useful for management research going forward. As contemporary forms of technology and organizing are increasingly understood to be multiple, fluid, temporary, interconnected and dispersed (Ciborra, 1996; Stark, 1999; Child and McGrath, 2001; Law and Urry, 2004), a perspective that renounces the categorical presumption of separateness is likely to offer a more useful conceptual lens with which to think about the temporally emergentsociomaterial realities that form and perform contemporary organizations.

Multiple, fluid, temporary, interconnected and dispersed. I wonder if this type of environment would make the average oil and gas worker more productive? I wonder if the producer would be more profitable here vs. say SAP or through Oracle Fusion? This is how I see the oil and gas industry being able to raise it's productivity to the level necessary to fuel the worlds demand for energy. If you are a producer that sees this as a reasonable way in which to proceed, then please support these software developments and the Community of Independent Service Providers here. And if you're a user that sees the benefits of logging into this environment as opposed to spending the two and a half hour ritual needed to get to work. Please, sell short the commercial real estate stocks you own and join us here.

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Restating Our Value Proposition.

Another reason that the oil and gas producers should financially support this blog is our compelling value proposition. Based on a business model that allocates the costs of development over the population of subscribing producers. This creates value by assessing the producers only once for the development costs plus an element of profit as developers. The Community of Independent Service Providers (CISP) who provide direction and guidance to the developers are part of these costs. However, their costs in using the software to support the producer will also be billed directly by the members and do not attract the profits element for People, Ideas & Objects.

These are user-driven developments that have the user in the forefront of designing, implementing and supporting ERP software for their producer clients. This is a complete restructuring of the industry in order to "Provide producers with the most profitable means of oil & gas operations".

The perspective of People, Ideas & Objects towards software is that it's a journey and not a destination. An innovative oil and gas producer can not subscribe to a fixed ERP system when the political, technical, logistic and financial difficulties continue to escalate. As things change so should the software and the CISP who use it. This dynamic attribute can only be provided in the fashion that is discussed in this software developments value proposition.

In order for the success of this development and community to provide value to the producer. We need to provide the most profitable means of oil and gas operations. This is People, Ideas & Objects competitive advantage. It's important to realize that our competitive advantage can only occur if the strategy of the producer focuses exclusively on their competitive advantages. And lets be clear the choice of ERP system has absolutely nothing to do with an oil and gas producers competitive capability or advantage. For a producer to attain the success they are searching for. They need to build the engineering and earth science capability within their firm. In addition their asset base is where their scientific capability will be applied. People, Ideas & Objects competitive advantage only provides the producer with the knowledge that from an administrative point of view, it is the most cost effective and efficient means of production.

If you are producer and this value proposition resonates with your perspective of the future oil and gas producer, please review our Funding Policies & Procedures. If your a user, please join us here.

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McKinsey on De-leveraging

McKinsey on De-leveraging

Rarely are we provided with research that is applicable both professionally and personally. McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) have just published a comprehensive document entitled "Debt and De-leveraging: The Global Credit Bubble and Its Economic Consequences". A country by country breakdown of debt levels and the situations that both individuals and organizations will face in the coming years. The document can be downloaded from here. (Registration required.)

Although there is no breakdown by industry. Oil and gas is not in the situation where they are highly leveraged, in comparison to other industries. The high prices of the last few years did fuel heightened levels of activity, but those were with cash flow generated from production. As I have indicated many times, producers are being rewarded for their innovativeness. Borrowing money and raising capital are no longer the critical determinants of success in oil and gas.

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Professor George Schultz on MIT Video

In a video entitled "Energy: The Past Must Not Be Prologue". Professor George Schultz reflects on the stop / go mentality regarding energy. During his tenure of the Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan administrations he saw first hand the effects of disjointed and canceled initiatives. Now that we are in a similar situation, and as he notes more dire as a result of the U.S. importing over 60% of their oil needs. He hopes that the situation regarding the long term vision of energy security is fulfilled through a long term commitment.

Secretary Schultz starts his presentation by stating his thesis.

Over the past four decades we have experienced a roller coaster ride on an energy express that has landed us unnecessarily in a place that is dangerous to our economy, our national security and our environment. Now in 2008 we have the chance to realize what we know. We can do something that we should of done long ago, and didn't.

His policies recommendations remind me of how sound the Reagan administration was. One of the stalwarts of the Reagan years was George Schultz in a variety of positions. It is clear in hindsight that he served his country well. His policy recommendations are exactly what needs to be enacted. This is a frustrating topic for him. His attempts to resolve some of these problems in the Nixon administration were obviously frustrated by the politics of the day. Nonetheless he suggests he is optimistic this time, and that this time may be different but we have to get it right and stick to it.

His recommendations are:

Give wind and solar a consistent tax environment. Agreed these will not provide the type of scale of even hydro electricity but everything helps.

Conservation. Disagree, not to suggest we should be wasteful, but energy is the means in which economies operate. Attempts to conserve may be counter to the benefits of the economy. If each barrel of oil offsets 18,000 man hours of physical labor, deferring the use of that energy is counter productive. The costs of one barrel of oil will show the world that at future prices it will remain the best of bargains.

Carbon capture and sequestration. Agreed, CO2 is a miscible agent and therefore has the dual role of pressuring formations and enabling more oil to be separated from the rocks that hold it. The more CO2, the less the cost, the greater the benefit to future production.

Nuclear power, Schultz suggests a careful opening of this means of energy production. Not that nuclear energy production is bad, its the waste and nuclear proliferation that create more problems.

Stop doing some of the dumb things that we are doing. "The encouragement of producing corn based ethanol" is a dumb policy. Agreed more energy is consumed in the entire process then what is produced.

Develop our own oil and gas resources. Or as Sarah Palin says, drill baby drill.

A floor price for oil and gas prices in the U.S. Having a defined value for the resources you find and produce will go a long way to stabilizing the stop / start manner of the energy industry. The costs to the consumers may actually be less in the future.

Heavy spending on basic research. Cites an example in the health debate of how more is being spent on insurance, whereas the reason the quality of health care is so high is the basic research that has been undertaken. Schultz also notes the role of innovation in the development of science.

At around 30:00 minutes Professor Schultz quotes MIT President Susan Hockfield in an impassioned call for sustained energy research.

Lastly at 54:00 minutes he notes the effect of the academic life, or the living in the world of ideas. When he was called upon by government he was always able to leverage the ideas that he knew were around. I think this is something that the users, and most specifically the Community of Independent Service Providers, can do with their career. The Draft Specification is the beginning of the ideas in People, Ideas & Objects. They will be able to be taken and built upon in ways that we can't even imagine today.

As always, if you are a producer and would like to support these communities financially, please follow our Funding Policies & Procedures, and if you are potential user, please join us here.

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