Operational Control Part II
In terms of operational control the “Dynamic Capabilities Interface” of the Research & Capabilities module provides a means to have everyone on the team operating from the same hymn sheet. Everyone knows what the plan is and everyone knows what everyone else is doing. Now we need a means in which to execute the plan. A way in which to deploy the tacit knowledge held by the team. In the “Planning & Deployment Interface” as well as in some other interfaces users will have access to the “Job Order System” of the People, Ideas & Objects Preliminary Specification. This will provide the ability for a member of the operational team, with the operational authority as designated in the Military Command & Control Metaphor, to issue a Job Order to execute a certain operation. Simply nothing is done during the field operation without the Job Order being issued.
And there is the budget. The AFE that was raised and approved for the operation is also at the hands of those that are in control of the operation. As has been mentioned many times throughout the Preliminary Specification. Within any interface certain aspects of the People, Ideas & Objects Preliminary Specification can be obtained by right clicking within the interface to pull up a contextual menu of items that enable certain actions. One of those actions could be the ability to approve an additional aspect of the operation for completion in the AFE.
The Work Order system will also be operational during these times. It will be providing the means in which to control the costs of the internal resources as those people charge their time to the AFE. The Work Order and Job Order are two separate and distinct systems. The Work Order aggregates the time that people are working on a specific project and bills them to the specific AFE or Work Order that is set up. It also works closely with the Military Command & Control Metaphor to layer a means to execute authority and responsibility within the resources that are committed to the project. These resources may be from different participants who are members of the Joint Operating Committee.
This next quote might be confusing without some discussion. It is from a Berkeley study and is dated in 1989, a time when the Japanese and the Americans were fighting over dominance in the microchip manufacturing industries. Apparently the two industries were configured quite differently, as Berkeley notes below. And it is the Americans that grew to dominate the industry at the Japanese almost total capitulation. The organizational structure of these industries is interesting to see some twenty three years later.
In one of the few contemporary academic examinations of this industry, a study by the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy concluded that; ... with regard to both the generation of learning in production and the appropriation of economic returns from such learning, the U.S. semiconductor equipment and device industries are structurally disadvantaged relative to the Japanese. The Japanese have evolved an industrial model that combines higher levels of concentration of both chip and equipment suppliers with quasi-integration between them. whereas the American industry is characterized by levels of concentration that, by comparison, are too low and [by] excessive vertical disintegration (that is, an absence of mechanisms to coordinate their learning and investment processes) (Stowsky, 1989) p. 3
My point in highlighting this is that we are relying heavily on the decentralized marketplace in the service industry to provide the oil and gas industry with the products and services it needs. We are however, also providing the Joint Operating Committee with high levels of coordination of the operation during the times it is employing the service industry. This is not a contradiction, one is a market, the other is an operation. The oil and gas industry depends on a highly innovative service industry and this will be expected from the marketplace. It also demands precision from the field operations that it conducts. Innovation will arise from both.
The Preliminary Specification provides the oil and gas investor with the business model for profitable exploration and production. People, Ideas & Objects Revenue Model specifies the means in which investors can participate in these user defined software developments. Users are welcome to join me here. Together we can begin to meet the future demands for energy.