OCI Resource Marketplace Module, Part III

 Coordination and knowledge sharing among service industries

As part of the Resource Marketplace module, we have developed what we call the Actionable Information Interface. By posting actionable information about their firm, producers, service industry firms, service providers, and vendors have access to a central location where others can respond. In terms of the other interfaces detailed in the Preliminary Specification so far, how does this interface fit in? In what way does it play a role in other activities in other modules? The purpose of this discussion is to clarify some of the different perspectives about the data and information that passes through the Resource Marketplace module and is generated there.

Following the Actionable Information Interface, the Research & Capabilities module will have blog posts. Authors of these blog posts are individuals working on original and innovative products within the Resource Marketplace. By publishing their ideas on this site, authors can earn their copyright and other Intellectual Property rights. These ideas codify market demand for original and innovative products and how entrepreneurs and innovators solve producer challenges based on the information contained in the Resource Marketplace module.

The Accounting Voucher module has an interface for designing transactions. Oil & gas companies will benefit from the ability to design the transaction in such a way that it achieves the greatest organizational efficiency both for the Joint Operating Committee and for the vendor. Identify which vendor performs which operations, when, where, and how. Once the design is complete, automate as much of the process as possible.

Finally, there is an interface for processing payments. This interface is part of the Accounting Voucher module. As we can see with all interfaces, they all interact strongly with the Resource Marketplace module. In the Resource Marketplace module, we need to capture the data and information that allows these other modules to function. That's one of the most critical functions of the module.

The Preliminary Specifications Resource Marketplace module is the source of the data used by the different interfaces that relate to it. The data in question is plain generic contact information that is used in business every day. We want to discuss how and who is responsible for the data. Also included are details required to process payments into the vendor's bank account, among other attributes. Most of this information can be found on the supplier's website, but it won't be sourced by anyone, as the supplier will maintain his or her own records in the Resource Marketplace module of People, Ideas & Objects.

Our "Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas"-based offering allows us to centralize the processing of People, Ideas, and Objects for producer clients in one place. Each supplier will maintain their own record within the Resource Marketplace module, so producer firms do not need detailed records of each vendor they have worked with. Consequently, inaccurate records and duplication of information between producers will be avoided, saving time and reducing errors. It is the supplier's responsibility to ensure that the information they provide in the Resource Marketplace is accurate. If a supplier changes address, they'll know best when they need to update their records. With specialization and the division of labor, and the proliferation of vendors, this task becomes more urgent. 

In order to create this Resource Marketplace “Supplier Interface,” the People, Ideas & Objects user community needs to identify and document the different data elements. In addition, all the interfaces and data requirements of the Preliminary Specification must be included here. In the process of designing transactions, suppliers and producers must be able to quantify and qualify their roles.

A supplier will have many of the same accounting and processing requirements as the producer and Joint Operating Committee. We ensure the producer achieves the most profitable means of oil & gas operations through People, Ideas & Objects et al. This involves the service industry. Our services for the service industry will ultimately reduce producers' costs since we can provide many of the same processing and accounting services as the producer. 

As part of our discussion on the Preliminary Specification Resource Marketplace module, I would like to discuss how suppliers will communicate with producers and Joint Operating Committees. The majority of vendors maintain information about their products and services on their websites. However, most of these sites are static and do not provide much opportunity for suppliers and producers to interact. The alternative to that interaction is the Resource Marketplace module. For purposes of identification we will call this the “Supplier Collaboration Interface.”

Our review of Professor Giovanni Dosi's paper, "The Sources, Procedures, and Microeconomic Effects of Innovation," revealed that technological trade-offs facilitate industries' innovations in response to changing technological and scientific paradigms. Trade-offs require a fundamental component that spurs change and is usually inexpensive and abundant. As a result, People, Ideas & Objects contend that innovation in oil & gas depends on the ability to seek and find knowledge, as well as the ability to collaborate. Knowledge and collaboration trigger a number of technological paradigms that will provide companies with fundamental innovative capabilities because of their inherent low direct costs.

Compared to any of the others listed here previously, I consider Supplier Collaborative Interface to be different. There is a blog in the Research & Capabilities module that may seem most similar. There is a blog in which people publish "original" ideas and technologies independently. This blog isn't a collaboration based on the research efforts of a few individuals, groups or firms. In the “Supplier Collaboration Interface”, the entire producer community will be invited to engage with the specific vendor to discuss their products and services through a collaborative interface. In order to define the vendor's offering in a collaborative manner, the whole community will be involved in these discussions.

The wiki style of this interface will cut down markedly on email volumes generated between vendors and producers. In many cases, this email is in the same context. Finding the relevant knowledge is the key to resolving the issue. Producers will be more inclined to use the People, Ideas & Objects Resource Marketplace module if they know there is a searchable, centralized wiki. By maintaining collaborations with producers on this Supplier Collaboration Interface-style wiki, suppliers will receive a return on their investment. Those who visit the site will see complaints and accolades, so the response to those comments will concern all producers and the Joint Operating Committees. This is the first line of customer service.

Everything in the oil and gas industry is derivative of earth science and engineering. Innovation is a result of the understanding of the sciences and leads to further advances in them. It becomes increasingly important to be mindful of these facts in the approach taken as the industry becomes more innovative. For innovative, safe, and successful execution of even the most basic operations, significant education and experience are required.

In the following manner, the People, Ideas & Objects application modules map innovation in the industry. In the Research & Capabilities module, people with innovative ideas in products and services write about them and earn rights to them by publishing them on a blog across the industry. Producers develop their capabilities around their land and asset base as “knowledge begets capabilities, and capabilities beget action”. Within the Research & Capabilities module, these capabilities can be captured through the Dynamic Capabilities Interface. Searches are then organized based on inherent attributes, such as the geological zone or Joint Operating Committee. For certain geological zones, this committee has access to its producers' capabilities via Knowledge & Learning modules. By learning what has and hasn't worked through the proceeding process, the Joint Operating Committee can apply the capabilities successfully and document it in the Knowledge & Learning module's lessons learned section.

Currently, this process has been documented in the Preliminary Specification for the modules. The issue lies with the last sentence. The part that states "apply the capabilities successfully" will undoubtedly require supplier involvement. In his paper, Professor Dosi emphasizes that innovation occurs when “capabilities and stimuli” are combined with “broader causes outside the individual industries, such as science.” As the oil & gas industry develops, this interaction is necessary to keep up with its innovative products and services. Producers' interactions with their suppliers are important, but all producers' interactions with those suppliers are equally important. Having these interactions reviewable reduces the producer's risk. In addition to providing a forum for the airing of concerns, IP has been earned by the supplier, so robust collaboration is possible to expand the understanding and knowledge of all parties.

Why are we developing the Supplier Collaborative Interface? Most people understand that doing the same thing over and over is easy. Making an organization change its routine is difficult, and when change is introduced, trouble begins. If we could just leave things the way they are, we could produce more oil and gas. Unfortunately, those days are long gone and oil & gas routines are anything but routine. Producers have broken the industry, and with the revenues of the industry, they can rebuild it in the vision of the Preliminary Specification. Professor Dosi notes the following points about this difficult situation.

Organizational routines and higher level procedures to alter them in response to environmental changes and / or to failures in performance embody a continuous tension between efforts to improve the capabilities of doing existing things, monitor existing contracts, allocate given resources, on the one hand, and the development of capabilities for doing new things or old things in new ways. This tension is complicated by the intrinsically uncertain nature of innovative activities, notwithstanding their increasing institutionalization within business firms. p. 1133

Recently People, Ideas & Objects introduced our Blockchain module which will work with each of the interfaces we've described. Identifying the area where the changes have occurred would be a futile effort that would render each of these interfaces redundant, unused and unneeded. By using Oracle Cloud ERP's Autonomous Database implementation. We have used their "blockchain" table implementation. Despite not being a true "blockchain" technology. As a result, these tables accept only the INSERT command, so each update is a separate and distinct amended text stored in a separate row. As a result, it is necessary to aggregate the rows of the table that contain the Preliminary Specifications Interface content in order to view it. The user will then be able to highlight within the wiki or blog what the differences are in terms of the changes in the technology or offering.

The Supplier Collaborative Interface of the Resource Marketplace module enables the Producer or Joint Operating Committee to mitigate tension and uncertainty in innovative activities.

It is important to keep the Supplier Collaborative Interface of the Resource Marketplace module and relate what is said here to the Preliminary Specification as a whole. In my earlier post, I discussed why People, Ideas & Objects is involved in the operations of the oil and gas industry so heavily. This is an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system designed to handle the business aspects of the oil & gas concern. As we see, it is impossible to separate the business from the science, and if we do, we will lose our innovative capabilities, and innovation will become nothing more than an ineffective science experiment.

There is uncertainty in both science and business. The two cannot be separated, as in other systems such as SAP. Perhaps this is why business systems today have not served the oil & gas industry well, in my opinion. By separating them, SAP loses the dynamic required to ensure science remains grounded in the oil & gas business. They are not aware of the innovative and scientific basis of the oil & gas business.

A Supplier Collaborative Interface will help the Joint Operating Committee focus on the scientific and business uncertainties associated with the innovations they are implementing. In many cases, the Joint Operating Committee will implement the technology or innovation for the first time. The supplier and vendor may have an issue troubleshooting aspects of the technology. During this period of business and technical risk and uncertainty, collaboration at the highest level will be crucial. Professor Giovanni Dosi notes;

However, even in the case of “normal” technical search (as opposed to the “extraordinary” exploration associated with the quest for new paradigms) strong uncertainty is present. Even when the fundamental knowledge base and the expected directions of advance are fairly well known, it is still often the case that one must first engage in exploratory research, development, and design before knowing what the outcome will be (what the properties of a new chemical compound will be, what an effective design will look like, etc.) and what some manageable results will cost, or, indeed, whether very useful results will emerge. p. 1135

So with respect to all of the interfaces in the Research & Capabilities, Knowledge & Learning and Resource Marketplace modules regarding the development of advancing technologies and capabilities. The actual implementation of the technologies from a business and technical point of view is done predominantly by the Joint Operating Committee in the field. This is when it was first used in commercial environments. An ERP systems provider must include this Supplier Collaboration Interface to mitigate the risks and uncertainty associated with an innovative Joint Operating Committee. By focusing on the owner of the IP, as stated in the Intellectual Property Organizational Construct of the Preliminary Specification, the industry can ensure there is no redundant effort. Entrepreneurs and innovators are motivated, will be rewarded for their efforts, and producers follow the law as set forth by the U.S. Constitution.

I suggest that, in general, innovative search is characterized by strong uncertainty. This applies, in primis to those phases of technical change that could be called pre-paradigmatic: During these highly exploratory periods one faces a double uncertainty regarding both the practical outcomes of the innovative search and also the scientific and technological principles and the problem-solving procedures on which technological advances could be based. When a technological paradigm is established, it brings with it a reduction of uncertainty, in the sense that it focuses the directions of search and forms the grounds for formatting technological and market expectations more surely. (In this respect, technological trajectories are not only the ex post description of the patterns of technical change, but also, as mentioned, the basis of heuristics asking “where do we go from here?”) p. 1134

Science and operations may have been separated in the past. As innovation costs rise, we seem to be unable to troubleshoot it from a science and business perspective as well. I certainly don't see how we can continue to parse the two perspectives from the business and send the respective departments to their respective sections of the operation. The Supplier Collaborative Interface is the first step to finding a better solution. Users within the Joint Operating Committee can resolve risks and uncertainties as soon as they arise, both from a business and scientific perspective.

As part of the Preliminary Specification, we have mapped the complex innovation processes of the innovative oil & gas producer in the Resource Marketplace, Research & Capabilities, and Knowledge & Learning modules. During this highly complex era of exploration and development for oil & gas, these processes reflect the dynamic nature of both producers and the service industry. During our discussion of the "Supplier Collaborative Interface," we discussed the connections that will be necessary to complete the last stages of the innovative process. As well as working with the other interfaces in the other modules, the Supplier Collaborative Interface has more to it.

We will continue our look at technological paradigms and their effect on scientific and innovative trajectories in oil & gas. In discussing these points related to innovation, it is important to keep in mind that the sciences, the trajectories they are on, and the opportunities they create for producers, are accelerating. This will continue. Also, remember that the Supplier Collaboration Interface benefited from the low costs of knowledge and collaboration. Two critical points are highlighted by Professor Giovanni Dosi.

First, new technological paradigms have continuously brought forward new opportunities for product development and productivity increases. p. 1138

Secondly, “A rather uniform characteristic of the observed technological trajectories is their wide scope for mechanization, specialization and division of labor within and among plants and industries.” p. 1138.

It's the second point I want to address. The discussion of the Supplier Collaborative Interface will result in "gaps" in products and services. In our research on Professor Richard Langlois, we found that it is through “gap filling” that the division of labor and further specialization can be expanded. The division of labor is expanded when someone sees that a gap needs to be filled, and they fill it. As a result of these discussions, a significant number of "gaps" will need to be filled within the Resource Marketplace as a result of these discussions in the Supplier Collaborative Interface.

However, I think these "Gap Interfaces" should also be found in the Supplier Collaborative Interface of the Resource Marketplace, as we discussed in the Research & Capabilities module. When the Preliminary Specification is fully reviewed by our user community, the actual location will be one of the things that needs to be determined. "Gap filling" can be seen in how People, Ideas & Objects perceives the need for the sub-industry between the producer firms and the Information Technology industry that we, our user community, and their service providers are filling. To fill the void created by a lack of communication and understanding between the two, a medium like the Preliminary Specification is necessary.

Producers and Joint Operating Committees are responsible for managing these innovation processes through People, Ideas & Objects Preliminary Specification. In the absence of software to define and support these processes, producers cannot develop these capabilities. Innovation in the oil & gas industry in the 21st century requires a software development capability, as suggested by People, Ideas & Objects, to achieve organizational efficiency of the scope and scale as defined in this Preliminary Specification. Innovation is dependent on multiple organizations working together. Spontaneous collaborations have also failed to occur. Leaving innovation to chance has not worked. We have learned from the Preliminary Research Report that innovation practices can be defined and deliberate. Apple consistently shows the world how it can be done, but not everyone can. 

It's one thing to have the process properly managed by software. It's another to have capabilities maintained in-house. And it's another to see innovations developed and applied. Having the ingredients does not guarantee innovation by the producer. In accordance with our research, People, Ideas & Objects does not believe that innovation can be developed without proper management of processes by software first and foremost. When it comes to their diminished capacities and capabilities, the service industry understands the problem. As long as oil & gas producers refuse to develop the Preliminary Specification, they will understand that their critical issue of underlying Intellectual Property will remain unaddressed. How will oil & gas producers redevelop the service industry beyond "muddle through"?

My objective is to discuss the results that producers and suppliers will achieve through collaborations undertaken in the Supplier Collaborative Interface of the Resource Marketplace module of the Preliminary Specification. Assuming the industry participates at the level outlined in the Preliminary Specification. As a result, producers would be able to discuss openly the issues and opportunities associated with the service industries. And those discussions were available for the entire industry to review. Would there not be a large leakage of proprietary information from those discussions from one producer to the next? And would this fear of leakage reduce participation to far less than the unconstrained debate assumed in the Preliminary Specification?

It is important to note that these are well-founded questions and appropriate concerns. However, just as people who read People, Ideas & Objects Preliminary Specification tend to find different things than others. Oil & gas experience, career choice, and educational level all play a part in this. Organizations are in the same boat. The producer's capabilities will determine what is gleaned from the discussion. Innovators and advanced producers will be able to utilize the conversation to its fullest extent, whereas laggard producers may not be able to fully comprehend certain nuances. It will depend very much on the capabilities of the producers and suppliers that hold the conversations.

Professor Dosi (1988) notes a study conducted by Richard Levin et al 1984, in which they studied “the varying empirical significance of appropriability devices of (a) patents, (b) secrecy, (c) lead times, (d) costs and time required for duplication, (e) learning curve effects, (f) superior sales and service efforts.” Professor Dosi (1988) observed, “that lead times and learning curves are relatively more effective ways of protecting process innovations, and patents a more effective way to protect product innovations.” Dosi concludes. “Finally, there appears to be quite significant inter-industrial variance in the importance of the various ways of protecting innovations and in the overall degrees of appropriability.” (p. 1139)

It's worthwhile to note that producers and suppliers pursue different objectives in terms of innovation strategies. Oil & gas producers emphasize process innovation, while industry suppliers emphasize product innovation. This division of labor allows producers and suppliers to interact more effectively through the Preliminary Specifications Research & Capabilities, Knowledge & Learning and Resource Marketplace modules. The producers and suppliers are attempting to secure innovative capabilities without conflict. (Producers are concerned with lead times, learning curves, while suppliers protect their innovations and capabilities through copyright and patents.) The fact that these are published in the Supplier Collaborative Interface across the industry brings depth to the discussion, but only to the extent that the producers' capabilities are able to assimilate the information. There is a limited shelf life of information in a rapidly growing world, so People, Ideas & Objects Preliminary Specification enables the producer to concentrate on their competitive advantages by coordinating the market for earth sciences and engineering capabilities, as well as its land and asset base. Intellectual Property laws have protected the supplier's competitive advantages.

OCI Resource Marketplace Module, Part II

 Introduction

This marketplace will include all producers and suppliers. They will be able to define, create and conduct business in the actual resource marketplace that exists. The scope and size of the Resource Marketplace, our user community and their service provider organizations will accommodate ExxonMobil's needs down to the single entrepreneur starting out in the oil & gas business. To exclude any group, profession, organization, or person from the Resource Marketplace, or any module of the Preliminary Specification, would limit the value available to the industry. Whatever service, product or solution is provided to the energy industry by individuals, those employed by producers, Joint Operating Committees, or companies providing services to the producers. This should include SLB and anyone directly or indirectly employed in the energy industry. As Professor Langlois suggests “the elements of organization, knowledge, experience and skills” and we include ideas in that list. 

Defining the Term "Designing Transactions"

I wish to discuss what is meant when I say that users of the People, Ideas & Objects Preliminary Specification will “design transactions” in the Resource Marketplace and Accounting Voucher modules. Transaction Cost Economics is a key element of how the energy industry controls its costs. Designing transactions is the key to savings and efficiencies. Also I want to highlight the role of the user as an active agent in making things “happen” in the Resource Marketplace.

As with any marketplace the focus must be on the user in this case could be a producer and most particularly an engineer or geologist, a service industry representative or service provider. Users have access to the People, Ideas & Objects Resource Marketplace module. This user optimizes the “tasks” and “actors” involved in transactions, and can turn the producers' or Joint Operating Committees' needs into a demand for services in the Resource Marketplace Module.

There are two changes that change things in the future. These changes are due to organizing the use of the Joint Operating Committee as the key organizational construct of an innovative producer. One is that designing transactions will become a skill that will be used more. And two, the division of labor is going to expand, meaning that a job that may have had a few contractors to complete today, may now have an order of magnitude more in terms of numbers of contractors tomorrow. Consider the following.

When people buy a major item in their lives like a house or a car. They detail what is and what is not included in the price. Who provides what and when it is expected to be completed. This is what designing transactions means. It's more or less what lawyers do for a living, or that is to say, it is a crucial aspect of their work on any commercial sale agreement. This type of work is where the organization's costs and efficiencies can become onerous and complex. If a firm has “engineered” their transaction costs down to a fine degree, they can manage their costs efficiently. This will be the case for an oil & gas producer or a Joint Operating Committee. Transaction costs include installation, finance, testing, specifications, materials to be used and engineering consultants, etc. In oil & gas, even for a small job these costs could become problematic. Now add the enhanced level of specialization and division of labor developed through the Organizational Construct of the Preliminary Specification. We have a more complex transaction. 

Producers should focus on their land & asset bases, as well as the coordination of Earth Sciences & Engineering capabilities with the market. Product and service providers should focus on their key competitive advantages. Let some of the work they have done in the past go to specialists at different companies. This will increase the number of vendors producers use to conduct normal operations in the field. This specialization and enhanced division of labor will provide enhanced efficiencies and cost control for the producer firm through more competitive and innovative solutions. It will also increase the throughput of transactions producers will have to deal with. It will also emphasize transaction design.

On the other end of this process is the product or service provider who can contract for what the producer needs. They too have interfaces to the Resource Marketplace module similar to those of the producers. These users, who may have anticipated market demand, are the first to configure an innovative solution. Are able to market their product or service effectively through the specific interfaces of the Resource Marketplace Module. These elements of competitive market changes reflect the producer's needs as determined in the Resource Marketplace, and its use of transaction cost economics (TCE). This process involves an iterative loop of constant improvement and automation of transactions and processes in the energy industry. Leading to enhanced productivity, throughput and performance for all parties, especially the producer firm. 

After the Joint Operating Committee or producer discovers these resources, contract negotiations between the parties can begin. The first step in contracting is determining exactly what the transaction should look like. This is determined by the Accounting Voucher interfaces. This would then lead to the specific negotiations, automation of the contract creation, and assignment of the Resources to the contract. From there this software should enable high levels of automation to relieve the user of work that is better suited to computers. It should also focus on the transaction's optimization and efficiency.

How the Market Must Develop

In many ways the Resource Marketplace module of the Preliminary Specification is the crossroads of many of the other People, Ideas & Objects application modules' major processes. It is where the Accounting Vouchers transaction design will ultimately be exercised. And where the Research & Capabilities overall process of capabilities development and implementation will be realized. Maybe most importantly it is a marketplace module where people can buy and sell their ideas, products and services of what innovative and profitable oil & gas producers need. The Research & Capabilities module is a long term process of maintaining and increasing the earth science and engineering capabilities of the firm and Joint Operating Committees. The Resource Marketplace module is the day-to-day implementation of those policies.

We also see in the Resource Marketplace module some of the efficiencies of using the Joint Operating Committee as the key organizational construct of an innovative producer. And that is a significant differentiation of the Resource Marketplace module compared to the Accounting Voucher and the Research & Capabilities modules. It is primarily aimed at the Joint Operating Committee. Consequently, it represents the many participants of the Joint Operating Committee. It therefore has the influence (industry standardization) on many producers' Accounting Voucher and Knowledge & Learning modules needs. Optimizing transactions between contracting parties will improve industry performance. From my research into Professors Langlois and Baldwin's theories, I believe these changes will improve overall performance.

Another key point is the tearing down of the basis of Intellectual Property (IP) which is another Organizational Construct employed in the Resource Marketplace module. An industry such as oil & gas is based on earth science and engineering needs. After all, it is a science-based business. For the industry to expand its capabilities in science and innovation. We will need to overcome many difficult problems. And as we progress, the volume of ideas needed will be an order of magnitude greater than what is required today. These problems cannot be solved in an environment where there is no incentive for individuals to solve them. To make the necessary industry-wide changes, companies must focus on motivating people to solve these problems and earn their Intellectual Property rights. This therefore turns the oil & gas industry into a more dynamic business. Intellectual Property cannot be claimed as a competitive advantage for producers.

Professor Giovanni Dosi's 1993 paper “Hierarchies, Markets & Power” which is a must read for those wanting to dive deeper into these subjects. States that a simplistic organization model will include the following, and I have annotated the areas where these are addressed in the Preliminary Specification;

The distribution of formal authority. [The Industrial Command & Control.]

The distribution of actual power in the above distribution [The people]

The incentive structure. [Innovation, intellectual property, and capabilities.]

The structure of informational flows. [Security & Access Control Module]

The distribution of knowledge and competence. [The people] p. 10

History, so to speak, solidifies into structures that constrain future developments. p 12

The purpose of developing this “Marketplace” is to ensure the industry structure remains flexible and amenable to changes in sciences and innovation. But also to attain and maintain the highest performance. And in this next quotation Professor Dosi notes how this will happen.

Clearly, it is the domain of Schumpeter’s creative destruction’, and of Moore’s (1978) analysis of the social bases of obedience and revolt, to name but two famous examples, and it applies also to the dynamics of economic organizations and institutions at large. p. 13

What I hope to convey in the discussion of the Resource Marketplace is the broader question of how capabilities and capacities are generated by markets. Information plays a role in this and the generation of ideas that make markets dynamic. Lastly we must rely on the market forces of creative destruction to ensure that today’s bureaucracy loses its hold on the reins of power (somebody has got to lose).

As we noted, oil & gas issues will not be solved until incentive structures align towards those that solve the problems. Today, in the service sector, the oil & gas industry exploits the lack of identifiable Intellectual Property (IP) by more or less ignoring it and passing it around to other firms in the service sector and its competitors. This lack of respect for those that developed the ideas has resulted in a situation where service industry representatives have ceased to innovate or sponsor new start-up firms as competition. Producers are losing as they are unable to meet their needs by a diminishing capacity of the service industry.

The situation has become so dire as there is hardly any to no research and no start-up opportunities in the oil & gas service sector. The exact opposite of what is needed at a time like this. Oil & gas producers are reputed to be so difficult to work for that securing staff makes it impossible to launch a firm. Even if a firm is formed, the producers will look down their nose at it and scoff at the fact that the firm was so small. Such is life in the rarefied air of producers officers and directors.

Nonetheless, what's in it for the producers to accept that the IP should pass from their control to those that will take the time, energy, financial and intellectual risk to solve the producers' problems? If we look back to one of the base assumptions that the People, Ideas & Objects software operates under. We find that the competitive advantages of the producer firm are its physical assets and land base, and the coordination of the markets earth science and engineering capabilities. Where in these producers' competitive advantage does any product or services Intellectual Property of the oil & gas service industry provide value to the producer? Why would they need their Intellectual Property?

Producers make money by acquiring, exploring, exploiting and producing oil & gas reserves profitably. That should be pretty obvious. However, on the basis of how producers manage IP in the industry, they seem to think that drill bits and rigs are their future competitive advantages. What the producer needs is the most advanced and dynamic service industry marketplace that is innovative, productive, profitable and fiercely competitive. This is in order to achieve optimal productive output. What producers should ask themselves is what have they got now?

Add this cultural change to the numerous other cultural changes that parallel the scope and scale of change introduced in the People, Ideas & Objects Preliminary Specification. The greater oil & gas economy knows the difficulty ahead. These are the difficulties created by the producer firms' bureaucracy. They have to change. And I can’t see that happening. It's Schumpeter's creative destruction to sweep out the old and bring in the new. Or it's a time to revolt. The new consists of the fourteen module Preliminary Specification that deals with IP in a manner that will allow difficult problems to be solved. 

Serendipity, spontaneous order and creative destruction are hamstrung by the producer firm's ERP software. Without the permanent software development capability of People, Ideas & Objects, our user community and their service provider organizations the industry will remain in its current state. Without IP in the hands of entrepreneurs and innovators, how will oil & gas rebuild itself and face its challenges? 

It All Starts With Actionable Information

People, Ideas & Objects is designed to identify and support innovative and profitable oil & gas producers. It is within the Resource Marketplace module that I continually run into the conflict currently in the marketplace between producers and the service industry. The conflict being the high cost of field operations and Intellectual Property ownership. This conflict is the issue that the Resource Marketplace module seeks to resolve by first opening up and developing the actionable information available within the marketplace.

This actionable information can be captured in an interface similar to any contact database. Actionable data can include short- to mid-term plans and aspirations of service industry providers. For example, if they were a small drilling rig company looking to acquire another rig they could post within the actionable information area of the database. They could also post that they were actively looking for producers within a certain geographical region to contract for drilling in the third quarter of next year. Producers searching for such opportunities may then evaluate it based on further discussions with the vendor. The drilling rig company, having contracts in hand from the producers, can secure financing and purchase the rig they've specified.

Actionable information can also be from the producer who might be approaching the start-up of a large project and will need to staff up to meet the demands. Or a producer may want to develop in an isolated remote area and need more infrastructure in place. Expressing a need is the first step in having the solution provided. As Professor Giovanni Dosi notes.

Thus, I shall discuss the sources of innovation opportunities, the role of markets in allocating resources to the exploration of these opportunities and in determining the rates and directions of technological advances, the characteristics of the processes of innovative search, and the nature of the incentives driving private agents to commit themselves to innovation.

Centralizing this industry-wide information within one location will help to ease its use. This information is available on the web in some form and can be interpreted from their plans. By stating clearly what their actionable plans are within a central database, the information will be easier for users to access. Innovation comes about when plans are not set and ideas and opportunities flow. 

I want to make clear that this Actionable Information Interface will be different from the Petroleum Lease Marketplace interface. Recall there is an interface that takes the capital expenditures of the firms for the next few years, primarily from the AFE and reserves reports. It scrubs any proprietary information from it, aggregates all of the producers' identifiable data and publishes it based on a general geographical region. This provides the marketplace with a general understanding of the size of that market in the next few years. And it is different from the detailed information contained within the Actionable Information Interface. These expenditures are more or less seen as necessary to maintain and fully exploit the known reserves. The Actionable Information Interface would be for potential new business. This interface will be a critical part of the process that begins in the Resource Marketplace module. It continues through the Research & Capabilities and Knowledge & Learning modules.

A couple of quick points to note. The first item to note is that the Resource Marketplace module is both a producer and Joint Operating Committee facing module. That is to say it will be used in the producer organization for human resources, payroll and securing the resources the producer needs. And will be used by the Joint Operating Committee for field products and services. It may be obvious to some that this is the case however, I am stating this for clarity. The other item pertains to all of the modules in the Preliminary Specification and that is by right clicking the mouse, it will bring up a contextual menu of options that the user can select an appropriate action from the People, Ideas & Objects software application. Whether this is a Work-Order, Purchase-Order, AFE, or any of the other documents managed in the system. This will be available to the user through this facility.

We have discussed the posting of actionable information in the “Actionable Information Interface” of the Resource Marketplace module. A place where service industry providers and producers can post actionable information in a centralized, searchable and analyzable database. Most importantly we noted that this is the starting point for innovation. People, Ideas & Objects assume that high commodity prices finance enhanced innovation at the producer level. Therefore the need to stimulate innovation between the producers and the service industry starts with this actionable information.

In addition to the funds necessary to finance innovation there are what Professor Giovanni Dosi calls “technical trade-offs.” These trade-offs facilitate industries' innovation in the changing technical and scientific paradigms. Crucial to the facilitation of these trade-offs is a fundamental component that spurs change and is usually abundant and available at low costs. For innovation to occur in oil & gas, People, Ideas & Objects would assert that the ability to seek and find knowledge, and to collaborate are two “commodities” that are abundant today. With their inherent low direct costs, knowledge and collaboration are the triggers for a number of emerging paradigms that will provide producer firms and participants in the greater oil & gas economy with fundamental innovations. These paradigms are best captured in intellectual thought's leverage. Just as 20th century development was driven by mechanical leverage. Fueled by oil & gas. The Resource Marketplace module prepares the groundwork for people in the oil & gas and service industries to exploit this opportunity. 

Professor Dosi states “In very general terms, technological innovation involves or is the solution to problems.” Dosi goes on to further define this as “In other words, an innovative solution to a certain problem involves “discovery” (of the problem) and “creation” since no general algorithm can be derived from the information about the problems. Solutions to technological problems involve the use of information derived from experience and formal knowledge. It is the specific and uncodified capabilities, or “tacit-ness” as Professor Dosi describes “on the part of the inventors who discover the creative solution.”

This is the point I wanted to make in this follow-on discussion of the “Actionable Information Interface.” Where will innovative solutions come from? Who will solve the problems? It will come down to the person who first sees the problem. And that person may be anywhere in the industry. They may be the vice-president of production at an oil & gas producer. Or they might be like Steve Jobs who started out in his parents' garage. The point is for the industry to be all inclusive and have its problems identified by those who can see them and resolve them with their innovative solutions. I wonder what reading the Actionable Information Interface of 200 producers would provide in terms of seeing what and where the imputed problems were?

OCI Resource Marketplace Module, Part I

 Abstract

People, Ideas & Objects, our user community and their service provider organizations provide our Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas software and service. This is based on the Preliminary Specifications integration within Oracle's Cloud ERP tier 1 solution. Providing North American producers with the most profitable means of oil & gas operations, everywhere and always. We suggest that it’s no longer enough to own an oil & gas asset. It will be necessary to have access to our Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas software and service. To ensure a producer's oil & gas assets are profitable everywhere and always.  

Adam Smith wrote in the Wealth of Nations that “political economy” is based on three attributes. First there is the “Economizer Argument” which is the fact that each person seeks out the most efficient use of their resources. Second, the “Local Knowledge Argument” holds that individuals are best suited to making decisions regarding themselves and their resources. Third is the “Invisible Hand Argument” where self interest is the motivating factor that forms the invisible hand of the market. In “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” Smith states the three “P’s,” consisting of “person, property and promise” provide individuals with the means of pursuing their interests by appealing to others' interests. We therefore build value for society in exchange for our efforts. Oil & gas is a primary industry. Its revenues are generated through ongoing sales of oil & gas production. Its interests are captured in the service industry and all of the subsequent tiers of supporting industries that service and supply oil & gas. It is from this perspective that the Resource Marketplace module of the Preliminary Specification is undertaken.

In the 1990s Professor Paul Romer formulated a number of original theories which became New Growth Theory. And in 2018, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for these. Professor Romer replaced the economic growth theory of investments in transportation, communication and capital markets. These types of investments appeared to have waned in effectiveness due to their maturity. And established the New Growth Theory which uses People, Ideas and Things as the three areas where investments will yield the greatest growth. Introducing the conceptual model of non-rival costs inherent in the Preliminary Specification. Such as our Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas provides for the sharing of non-competitive areas of a producer's overhead infrastructure. Substantially reducing the oil & gas industries' aggregate overhead costs. Romer suggested ideas such as the consolidation of one size of coffee cup lid to eliminate the need for incremental and unnecessary costs as an example of his principle. It was on January 1, 2006 that I named this initiative People, Ideas & Objects. This reflects our adoption of these principles throughout our modules and organizations and that we’re object-based Java developers.

People, Ideas & Objects Resource Marketplace module is the manifestation of these broader economic principles. We’ve chosen to employ the invisible hand of the market and Internet to disintermediate the centralized control of producer firms who have failed comprehensively in their ability to meet investor needs and other stakeholders, and now appear to be jeopardizing their customers' access to affordable, reliable and abundant energy. Service and other industries provide producers with the scale of operations, geographical diversity and technological skill to undertake field operations. They are employed exclusively by oil & gas producers yet are treated as leeches and lepers. Are and have been serially and chronically abused for decades. These industries have fundamentally broken down, as their capacity and capabilities have diminished beyond what is currently realized. And like producer firms, decimated capital structures. Based on this perspective, the Resource Marketplace module believes that the problems in the service and other industries are caused by the producer firms. As such, we have adopted the attitude that "producers broke it, producers need to fix it" in terms of providing financial resources from the oil & gas primary industry revenue to rebuild these industries. There is nobody else. And a rebuilding of these markets in the vision of the Preliminary Specification is necessary as the destruction and dismantling of the oil & gas industry at the hands of its officers and directors is comprehensive and complete. 

Preamble

The Preliminary Specification invokes seven major organizational constructs that seek to provide everyone that works throughout the greater oil & gas economy with a fundamental understanding of “what,” "how" and “why” the dynamic, innovative, accountable and profitable oil & gas producers operate. “How” and “what” is necessary to achieve the most profitable means of oil & gas operations, everywhere and always. There are other constructs imputed such as the law, the economy and the regulatory environment. These are obvious and are not mentioned here other than as frameworks in the Joint Operating Committee as our key Organizational Construct. They are also mentioned elsewhere such as in the Compliance & Governance module. 

The seven Organizational Constructs employed in the Preliminary Specification and evident in the Resource Marketplace module include. 

• Joint Operating Committee
• Specialization and the Division of Labor
• New Growth Theory
• Innovation
• Markets
• Intellectual Property
• Information Technology

Further information as to the "how" and “what” influence these have on the Preliminary Specification can be found in our RFP Response and on the Organizational Constructs pages of this wiki. 

Resource management and development are the focus of this module. Oil & gas businesses demand field operations scattered across the continent. Producers therefore rely on the geographical, technical and operational capabilities and capacities of the service industry participants in the diverse areas of their chosen operations. In an ideal situation producers would be provided with a broad and diverse offering through dynamic, innovative and thick markets. Due to the past treatment of the service industry by producers this is not the case. Therefore, the producers have an obligation to work towards this objective through their active involvement, development, and financial commitment to rebuild the service industry. In a situation best described as “you broke it, you fix it” producers have degraded the oil & gas industry to the point where it can't profitably sustain operations. People, Ideas & Objects believe this began soon after the July 1986 oil price collapse and has been the case each and every day since. 

It is our hypothesis that producers face issues due to chronic and systemic overproduction of oil & gas. Capitalizing all of their costs, including overhead and interest, has bloated balance sheets and over reported profitability. Attracting investors which led to overinvestment which brought about further overproduction. Cutting costs in the field service area was the only method used throughout this period. This was in an attempt to deal with the fact that they never were able to capture their costs from their revenues. After 2015, without the investors annual cash infusion as a subsidy. And operating under the assumption that oil & gas commodities were “price takers” they’ve destroyed their business and the greater oil & gas economy. And now they suggest, as we enter a period of deprecated capabilities and capacities, we should look elsewhere for our oil & gas as they as producers are incapable, unmotivated, distracted and leaderless.

Officers and directors argue that overhead is not the concern that People, Ideas & Objects represent it to be. With some producers reporting overhead being 1% of their revenues, it's encouraging to know someone still believes in these financial statements. On average, overhead is capitalized by 85% in the industry. This is contrary to what we believe is the appropriate method of reporting a capital intensive business. It is reasonable to assume an operation such as oil & gas would have significant capital costs passed to the consumer in the prices charged for their product. That is not the case in oil & gas when the objectives of “building balance sheets” and “putting cash in the ground” override common sense. The cash consumed by the producer firm is literally stored in the ground as they do not receive the appropriate capital, overhead and interest costs in the prices they pass to the consumer. These costs are offset by the investor to allow producers to sit on the balance sheet in property, plant and equipment for decades. We call them “The Unrecognized Capital Costs of Past Production." To stroke the ego’s of the CEO’s and CFO’s as they strut down main street. This cash deficiency has not been rectified since we identified the issue in the Preliminary Specification over a decade ago. In conclusion, those overhead accounts have something in them beyond just their excessive size that officers and directors do not want to disclose. 

Overhead is a material cost in oil & gas and we believe that its size, particularly for the producer firm, is the secondary reason for chronic unprofitability. We therefore in addition to addressing the primary reasons for the lack of profitability, our decentralized production model also addresses the overhead costs of the producer firms. Through the reorganization of the administrative and accounting resources of the producer firms to the service providers in the Cloud Administrative & Accounting for Oil & Gas software and service, each producer will no longer have to incur and maintain the heavy cost of fixed administrative and accounting capacities and capabilities. These costs which are non-competitive attributes of the industry will become shared and shareable. We use Professor Paul Romer's “non-rival” costs to offer this service. Turning these into variable costs, variable based on profitable production, industry wide capacity and capability for administration and accounting. 

Officers and directors argue this couldn’t be done due to the service scope and scale of Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas. However, I’ll temporarily concede that they may have a point about scale. What I won’t concede is how they’ll approach the issue of scope when theirs is as large as ours. Each producer would need to individually undertake the same scope as People, Ideas & Objects, what Intellectual Property would each producer use and their budget limited to their own resources. Conversely with respect to scale, People, Ideas & Objects conceptually has an aggregate budget of the industry's resources to apply to this issue and resolve it through engineering principles. 

Secondly these overhead costs are subject to the abilities and capabilities that People, Ideas & Objects, our user community and their service provider organizations provide in the form of long term software development and service capacity and capability. Therefore specialization and the division of labor will be an iterative process of enhancing the quality of our service and increasing the throughput of our productivity. Specialization and the division of labor will increase performance in terms of costs over the status quo. And the overall throughput capacity of these resources will increase substantially through the iterative long term application of these enhancements from specialization. 

Within the Resource Marketplace module, we can approach these costs in several ways. First by eliminating and reducing the overall costs the industry incurs in replicating exact capacities and capabilities within each producer firm that are not distinct competitive advantages. Turning their behavior to variable, based on profitable production, non-rival costs and establishing the Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas service. Secondly, subjecting them to the primary means of value generation through specialization and division of labor, in an iterative process by way of our permanent software development capability. And subsequently charging these costs directly to the Joint Operating Committee to ensure that they are priced into oil & gas production costs. Removing the industry's cash sink-hole. With the Preliminary Specification ensuring that only profitable production is produced everywhere and always, and the variable nature of these overhead costs in the Preliminary Specification, the cash incurred in overhead will be returned to the producer in the current period, or not be incurred during times when a property's production may be shut-in.

Dare I ask again, in light of the obvious value this would provide, and the technical viability of doing this is just as possible as what could be attained within a producer firm, what is it that’s in those overhead costs that’s so controversial to the producers' officers and directors?

Executive Summary

What People, Ideas & Objects, our user community and their service provider organizations have set out to accomplish in the Resource Marketplace module is captured in this quotation from one of the primary research sources we’ve used. Professors Richard N. Langlois and Giovanni Dosi's publications were reviewed extensively in our research into the development of the Preliminary Specification. In this quote from Professor Langlois we learn about the direction we're heading.

[I]t seems to me that we cannot hope to construct an adequate theory of industrial organization and in particular to answer our question about the division of labor between firm and market, unless the elements of organization, knowledge, experience and skills are brought back to the foreground of our vision (Richardson 1972, p. 888).

To deal effectively with the Resource Marketplace in oil & gas, the producer will need tools to effectively engage with suppliers and others for the resources they need. The Resource Marketplace Module provides a window on the “Resource Marketplace” from Joint Operating Committees and producer firms. Anything of value that is contracted between “actors” in the oil & gas, service industries, service providers, software and our user community generated businesses will be found, contracted, managed, transacted and developed through this module. It's simply a virtual representation of these marketplaces. Enhanced with the full capabilities of a tier 1 ERP system in Oracle Cloud ERP. Therefore, transaction processing, negotiation, determination of available resources, determination of transaction costs, contract execution, effective software tools to monitor and verify compliance with the contract with the full support of our Resource Marketplace module and its interfaces to other modules of the Preliminary Specification and Oracle Cloud ERP.

Similar interfaces will be provided for the service industries. There are two parties to a transaction, and the efficiency of the producer would necessarily include the efficiency of the service provider as well. It is not just producers in the Resource Marketplace. Key to Resource Marketplace efficiencies are the mitigation of transaction cost friction. Friction on both sides of the transaction, due to the fact that transaction costs and most particularly dynamic transaction costs in the Resource Marketplace are costs that will ultimately be borne by the Joint Operating Committee and passed on to the producers.

It is the Joint Operating Committee and the Resource Marketplace that provide value to profitable and innovative oil & gas producers. Enabling the service industry to expand the market for their products and services. The availability of a diversity of new offerings and services, with new products or innovations on the products provided by existing suppliers. Producers define and support a dynamic, competitive and healthy service industry. However, before that happens, the need for the software and services defined here in the Resource Marketplace has to be built for the producer, the Joint Operating Committee and the service sector to support these markets. From Professor Richard Langlois' paper “Economic Institutions and the Boundaries of the Firm: The Case of Business Groups.”

The second hypothesis, which has resonances at least as far back as Gerschenkron’s famous “backwardness” thesis (Gerschenkron 1962), is that the way an economy responds to the problems of coordinating economic development depends not only on its own institutions and capabilities but also on institutions and capabilities elsewhere. It depends not only on an economy’s own history but on the history of other economies as well. The force of this observation is that an economy at the frontier of economic development (however we care to define that) is likely to respond to the coordination problem differently than an economy lagging behind that frontier. Specifically, an economy at the frontier is arguably more likely to rely on decentralized modes of coordination. This is so because uncertainty is greater at the frontier — uncertainty about technology, organizational form, market direction. p. 18

It is here that we find the reason for what plagues the North American oil & gas economy. Producers have chosen centralization as their theme to deal with the situation they’ve created. Issues remain unaddressed and the offered solutions remain limited to People, Ideas & Objects et al. As of 2023 similar solutions have been successfully implemented in many other industries through disintermediation or decentralized organizational business models and structures. This has been facilitated through Information Technology, specifically the Internet. As a result of issues in producers' firms, capabilities and capacities are now highly devalued across the service industry. The service industry is an industry established exclusively to provide producers with the operational, geographical and technical diversity they need to function. To the point where the service industry capital structure is non-existent due to the destruction authored by producer firms' officers and directors. At the same time, producers have oil & gas production deliverability volumes that haven’t been maintained for the past eight years. These volumes may collapse due to their neglect and the service industry’s deprecated capacity and capabilities. An uncertain situation best encapsulated as I see it as, oil & gas everywhere, but not a molecule left to burn.

OCI Artificial Intelligence Module

 With People, Ideas & Objects, our user community and their service provider organizations we have a powerful combination of proposed capacities and capabilities available for the dynamic, innovative, accountable and profitable oil & gas industry and producers. Assuming our budget is funded in the future. Which I can only conclude at this time will occur as long as the associated difficulties in oil & gas persist. And therefore I believe our funding is certain. When we add to this the incomprehensible list of capacities and capabilities of Oracle Corporation products and services. Add to these the models and markets built upon the Joint Operating Committee and six other Organizational Constructs of this Preliminary Specification. We will have a strong foundation to resolve industry issues. We will ensure that real profitability is earned everywhere and always throughout the North American oil & gas industry. What, if anything, is offered by officers and directors? And will the cost of their option be less than the trillions of dollars irretrievably lost so far?

'People, Ideas & Objects' identifies three distinct competitive advantages, namely our user community, Intellectual Property, and Research. These are how we earn our profits. We are a commercial operation and we will always be one as we’ve learned, just as everyone in oil & gas has, what real profitability is. Without real profitability there is nothing but waste and atrophy. To do anything in business the first question should be where does the money come from? It must come from a steady stream of profitability to support and sustain the operation. There is no other sustainable source of capital capable of doing so. Spending others' money is child’s play compared to developing and maintaining a profitable business. A culture of profitability has been lost through four decades of oil & gas management methods based on "muddle through."

Introduction to the Artificial Intelligence Module

Within the Preliminary Specification is the Security & Access Control module. This sets out the security and data access requirements for the oil & gas industry. Providing access to the right information at the right time to the right people with the right authority. This is at the right location and on the right device. Two other modules are the Performance Evaluation for the Joint Operating Committee and the Analytics & Statistics module for the producer firm. These modules are tools that build upon the basic data within the Preliminary Specification and Oracle applications. Organizing this data in an integrated manner and permitting two different perspectives of that same data, one from the point of view of the Joint Operating Committee, accessible by each of the authorized members of that property, and the other perspective from the producer firm providing their authorized users with access to their proprietary accounting and administrative data for subsequent analysis. 

Recently we announced that People, Ideas & Objects would develop as part of the Preliminary Specification, our own data model. This is a core part of our Intellectual Property. Our data model will be tailored to our user communities' needs and accommodate Oracle ERP Cloud data models. In addition, another aspect of People, Ideas & Objects is the Technological Vision we set out on August 26, 2006 in this blog. It has four components that are in place today, and we feel they provide us with significant differentiation in our product and service offering and will provide real value to the oil & gas industry and producers, enhancing their profitability once implemented. These four technologies include Java, Wireless Networks, IPv6 and Asynchronous Process Management. We are wirelessly connected to both WiFi and cellular networks. Soon we’ll have space-based networks such as Elon Musk's SpaceX StarLink and Swarm networks. As a background, these four technologies enable the Internet of Things (IoT) in an industry based on earth sciences and applied engineering science. Where oil & gas chemical components are measured and monitored in terms of pressure and temperature. The capacity and capability to monitor and control an unlimited number of devices throughout the producer's domain. Java and IPv6 enable addressing capabilities to ensure that the device being sought to monitor and control is the precise device being accessed. Java is a highly secure typed language that doesn’t confuse itself about which variable is which, etc. IPv6 networks may appear to have not been implemented, but that is not the case. They are available through Oracle’s ERP Cloud offering. Since 4G or LTE, the cellular phone network is the most significant IPv6 implementation to date. Cellular phones such as Apple and Android devices are IPv6 based devices accessing network voice and data over an IPv6 network.

As a result, we will have the total historical and proprietary data for the producer firm in the Performance Evaluation and Analytics & Statistics modules. And the historical data of each Joint Operating Committee. Analytical tools to enhance the meaning of that data and generate the necessary ad-hoc information that the user may find of value based on their unique competitive advantages of their land and asset base, earth science and engineering capabilities. Although these will be used in ways that are unique and value-generating for each producer firm. In addition, they will be used by all members of the Joint Operating Committee. These will be a base infrastructure that’ll be prepared and provided to each producer on a continuous basis through the People, Ideas & Objects et al infrastructure defined in this Preliminary Specification. 

The oil & gas industry lacks production discipline. Therefore it’s not a business and never will be a business without profitable business objectives as long as bureaucrats remain. Production discipline could be imposed by forming a North American cartel, (illegal) or government production mandates where no one is ever satisfied with their allocation. Or through implementation of the Preliminary Specification. Only the Preliminary Specifications method of production allocation, based on standard and objective “real” profitability will satisfy industry needs. A method that provides for a legal, fair and equitable production discipline. If the property continues to profit, it continues to produce. Otherwise why would you continue to produce if a properties loss reduces the overall profitability of the producer firm, effectively destroying the value of the properties reserves, adding the cost of the ongoing incremental losses to the costs of the reserves, incurring the costs of production and storage of surplus production instead of holding it as reserves and keeping the marginal, or unprofitable, production off the commodities market to ensure they’ll find their marginal prices. Marginal prices for all properties across the North American continent. Markets provide only one thing, and that is their price. If the price offered is profitable, produce. Bureaucrats refuse to listen to prices even when they're negative $40. They claim our method of production allocation is collusion. If making independent business decisions based on detailed, actual, factual accounting of individual properties' profitability is collusion, bureaucrats belong to the former Soviet Union. 

We provide the means to instill production discipline across North American oil & gas producers through our user communities service provider organizations. Service providers are a reallocation of existing producers' administrative and accounting resources into approximately 3,000 individual service provider companies. There the service provider will focus on one process and apply that process across the entire industry's data set. It will be at each service provider where the individual processes will be applied on a standard, objective, actual and factual basis across the industry. This will be done due to each of these processes being highly engineered by our user community during the development of the Preliminary Specification. They will also be continuously improved by our user community members to meet the requirements of the industry, regulators and all other stakeholders. As well as the needs of the producers and Joint Operating Committees. Therefore when the time comes to review the Joint Operating Committees' individual, complete and comprehensive financial statements for the month, a feature of the Preliminary Specification. And if they find that a property, for whatever reason, is no longer profitable they can confidently conclude the property needs to be shut-in. They’ll know that every other property in the industry has been assessed on the same objective, standard, detailed, actual and factual accounting basis and as a result each producer can accept that the accounting treatment they received on that property was no different in terms of being better, worse than any other property of theirs or other North American based producers. And therefore knowing that the producer's focus is to maximize profits everywhere and always, any unprofitable properties will only dilute their overall corporate profitability as well as collapse the commodity prices across their production profile, they will appreciate the value of this objective accounting information. They will be able to move the property to their inventory of shut-in properties where their earth science and engineering capabilities can be innovatively applied to rehabilitate the property in some manner to bring it back to profitability. All net positives for the producer and industry overall, but also for energy consumers who will benefit from an abundant supply at the lowest possible cost for their energy. 

In summary, this infrastructure we’re building is to provide the North American oil & gas industry with the most profitable means of oil & gas operations, everywhere and always. As mentioned, on top of this data we have two modules, the Performance Evaluation, and Analytics & Statistics modules that will provide enhanced tools to analyze this framework for their competitive advantage. Built on the detailed, actual and factual financial data of the operation. Not the operational or engineering data that has been modified or allocated and has no historical financial performance basis as is done today. Each producer has nowhere near the resources, capabilities or capacity to begin developing business process automation. Furthermore, the construction of such a facility would be redundant, counterproductive and wasteful. This is due to the specialization and demands of this environment. However, we know bureaucrats are more than capable of "muddling through" these technical changes. Deliberately maintaining poor quality ERP systems that produce specious accounting with obscure transparency and no accountability have fulfilled their purpose of bureaucratic nirvana.

Through our user community, producer firms will be able to enhance their ERP software. If they want or need changes to their existing systems, who do they turn to in today’s environment, who has authority at the producer, who has authority at the software vendor? In the Preliminary Specification people will only need to speak to the relevant user community member(s). Our users are the only people authorized to modify or prepare derivative works of the Preliminary Specifications Intellectual Property. Our developers are licensed to take directions only from our user community on what to develop. Our developers are otherwise blind, deaf and dumb to everyone else. Our user community members population is approximately the same as the number of service provider organizations they own and lead. They are focused on their area of expertise and are applying their specialization, division of labor, quality, automation, innovation, integration, leadership, issue identification and resolution, creativity, collaboration, ideas, design, planning, thinking, negotiating, compromising and using conflict and contradictions to get to the source of the issues as their key competitive advantages throughout their organization. User community members are the principles of service providers whose role is to provide tacit knowledge as a service. This is in addition to the explicit knowledge captured and delivered in the People, Ideas & Objects Preliminary Specifications software.

Artificial Intelligence

Our user community and their service provider organizations are the intellectual framework of the oil & gas industry in terms of accounting and administration. It would be my hope, and my expectation that one day our user community would provide the industry with software and services that anticipate oil & gas business needs, issues and opportunities on a proactive basis. The Preliminary Specifications software would address industry concerns. Taking a leadership role in the development of administrative and financial systems in the industry. The use of this framework, as I described earlier, is a natural extension of what it could be doing, but most importantly, what it should be doing. Ensuring that oil & gas remains dynamic, innovative, accountable and profitable everywhere and always. 

The term 'AI' usually sounds ominous, describing the next solution to all problems. I generally agree with this and believe we should put it towards resolving the ominous Y2K issue. But seriously, Artificial Intelligence is advanced automation. Breaking a problem down to its simplest form that is definable and manageable in a reasonable scope can be determined through this tool. This will automate and accelerate human decision making and other higher level processes. Which is a valuable tool in the right hands, and with the appropriate base of data from a historical accounting point of view. If you Google “baby formula” be prepared to be inundated with ads for baby formula from local and online stores. This is a preliminary application of AI and we see the benefits in Google's quarterly profitability. AI is highly dependent on the quality of data. As far as we know, producers' financial information isn't worth the paper it’s written on. The first priority therefore must be the implementation of the Preliminary Specification to ensure that financial data is captured appropriately and in a usable manner. Providing the base level tools for analytical and statistical analysis as a foundation for this Artificial Intelligence module. There is a need to expand this by stating that the data, analytical and AI framework of the Preliminary Specification will be a necessity for the implementation and use of the Internet of Things (IoT). Creating a future architecture where the three can work together.

Moving the Artificial Intelligence for ERP domain within the user community and service provider domain makes sense as a natural and necessary fit. My thinking on this began with the announcement by Mr. Thomas Siebel and his Artificial Intelligence firm C3.ai Inc. Thomas Siebel previously sold Siebel Systems to Oracle Corporation years ago. Siebel Systems is a Java server on which Oracle built Oracle Cloud ERP. C3.ai Inc's purpose is consistent with the ERP marketplace theme. Individual companies can spend vast amounts of money and time internally on ERP systems or Artificial Intelligence with no benefit. This wastes investment and unnecessary demand on critical AI and ERP resources. Mr. Siebel suggests that internal corporate AI initiatives fail 99% of the time. I would suggest that the level of destruction we’re witnessing in oil & gas today is due to bureaucrats' inability to understand their business. This is due to their deliberate atrophy of the ERP systems provider marketplace. If their ERP systems operated as they conceptually should, would the industry be where it is today?

Through the People, Ideas & Objects et al's Organizational Construct of Professor Paul Romer's New Growth Theory. We Will centralize industry resources into Artificial Intelligence-based ERP development. Software development demands are no longer a capability that can be attained in-house to ensure the full scope of the organization's needs are covered. AI is no exception. Therefore the Preliminary Specifications consolidation of the industries resources on one focused development in an objective, standard and compliant manner offers better functionality and capability at considerably less cost to each producer. Oracle has AI initiatives with their Oracle ERP Cloud, the base of our solution, and we will adopt those tools. We should consider including C3.ai as an additional opportunity to leverage value under our shared development costs. I believe that the addition of the AI module's capabilities is a natural extension of our user community and their service provider organizations. It is also an efficient use of industry AI resources. Enabling producers to focus on their key competitive advantages of their land and asset base, earth science and engineering capabilities and do so profitably. Investing time and energy to build ERP based AI capacity and capability once. Sharing the cost of development and this initiative's success across the industry. 

But there's more, the demand on AI resources in terms of practitioners would be too high to ensure that any individual producer could attain any level of AI competency or competitive advantage in the industry for ERP-based AI. It would duplicate our user community's capability in this area and answer the question, why is there that 99% failure rate? In a highly risk oriented Information Technological environment, the ability to share risk and mitigate failure rates should appeal. 

Yet producers would realize AI’s value based on their intuition and creative application of these business capabilities to their asset base. This ERP-based AI module does not distribute AI to each producer. We'll provide the organization and implementation of successful data integration with statistical and analytical tools and standard packaged Artificial Intelligence frameworks and algorithms. These will be valuable in oil & gas producers' ERP domain. It will therefore be incumbent upon the producers to take these tools, understand their operations and use them in their interpretation and application against their own proprietary data and business makeup. 

One of the aspects of the Preliminary Specification is that the administrative and accounting burden of each producer is substantially reduced. This is due to the changes we’ll institute through our seven Organization Constructs. These changes are a result of the burden of producers' fixed, unshared and unshareable administrative and accounting capabilities being reallocated to the industry's variable and shared administrative and accounting capabilities. Variable based on profitable production. Another key attribute that we’re using to reduce administrative and accounting costs, yet increase the performance and quality of our offering is by using specialization and the division of labor to be distributed across our service providers. These two elements of the Preliminary Specification will enhance producers' cost performance. We believe that overhead costs are substantial, and are one of the secondary reasons for producers’ chronic unprofitability. Specialization increases the performance trajectory of service providers' administrative and accounting resources by increasing their capacity with the same or even fewer resources. We also apply this principle to software development. More importantly is the unshared nature of current bureaucratic and redundant spending. The same overhead costs are incurred within each siloed producer organization. The cost of developing and maintaining these capabilities is unnecessary in the cloud era because they are redundant in non-competitive areas of the firm. Producer firms do not have distinct competitive advantages in these areas. People, Ideas & Objects use Professor Paul Romer's "Endogenous Technical Change'' and non-rival goods. As represented in our application of the Cloud Computing paradigm in offering our Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas software & services.  

A key difference between what People, Ideas & Objects have proposed is that the Artificial Intelligence module is properly constructed after business models, markets, architecture, infrastructure, functionality, organization and data are assembled. Officers and directors have been using Artificial Intelligence to enhance their thinking for years. It has provided no tangible results that we can see or know of. In fact it seems to People, Ideas & Objects that AI may have satisfactorily provided another viable scapegoat. This was to ensure investors knew bureaucrats were on the job. Except they have no usable data in the financial realm. Without that data being organized and managed appropriately what purpose is AI? Oracle has recently stated that IoT may increase firm data volumes fivefold by 2025. It may be a good time for the industry to pay attention to financial data and profits. Second, we consistently criticize producers for spending money on initiatives that they consider "the next great thing."

They've Been Swimming Naked!

 The tide has rolled out and I’m advising no one to look. It's not something you can forget. Financial statements of the producers in our sample have taken a step downward based on my interpretation of the industry. Over the past few years my interpretation has been different from what the CEOs of the producers were representing. As they ceremoniously paraded their balance sheets down main street. Thank God we didn’t have to see them naked while they did one of these parades. Producers have stuck to their principle objectives of cash flow and growth. Oops, scratch that, cash flow and growth aren't doing well. Running an industry into the ground is a special talent and requires dedication and commitment over the long term. Thankfully, producers officers and directors have been up to the job and caused the most comprehensive destruction I’ve seen.

In the book Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Salvation of Free Government, Professor Larry Arnn stated.

Churchill chose differently. “[N]ations which went down fighting rose again,” he said, “but those which surrendered tamely were finished.

Churchill spoke about the French surrender in WWII. I don’t think it's reasonable to suggest that these officers and directors surrendered as courageously as the French. “Muddle through” would seek to ensure that every last bit of executive compensation was extracted before their final capitulation. “Are we there yet?" kids ask during summer vacation. It seems to me that we’re close to it though. History shows officers and directors lack the motivation to stick it out when things become untenable. Digging through closets full of skeletons is painful work and not what they signed up for. During the Great Depression, they found it profitable to move to greener pastures in other industries. We’re seeing some spontaneous retirement announcements in the industry. Two high profile and unexpected announcements were Pioneer and Cenovus. The trick is to wait for the Stampede of retirement and then no one will remember your name. 

Last week the Wall Street Journal's and Bloomberg published some indictments of officers and directors' performance. From WSJ Real Time Economics email subscription this graph shows the effect of “muddle through” on the industry's performance over the mid term. For those readers unfamiliar with oil & gas, I can assure you that the short and long term effects are the same. The industry has not performed meaningfully since the late 1970s. Establishing a non-performance culture. They don’t know what profitability is. They don’t understand how profitability is earned. They don’t know how to profit themselves. And worse, they couldn't care less about profits.  

Investors took their chances and suffered the consequences of their decisions. We saw in 2015 the investment and banking community turn their backs on the highly specious financial statements of the producers. When everything spent is an asset, it's easy to report profits. Culturally, this leads to an acceleration to the bottom over four decades. 

The fact is that everyone else in the industry except those in the lofty positions of officers and directors has been severely affected by this deliberately destructive mismanagement. I claim it's deliberate. Scroll to the left column of this blog and see that it was December 2005 that I began writing about these issues and the Preliminary Specification as the solution. How else do you account for almost twenty years of “muddling through” except purposeful, deliberate, self-serving destruction? To note also the dishonest way they've approached People, Ideas & Objects during this time. 

Bloomberg wrote on May 3, 2023 in “The US Shale Oil Capital Won’t Invest in Itself” documenting the disastrous consequences of “muddle through.” Here are just a few of the points that stood out to me. Note that these points were identified as causes of inaction by producer officers and directors. 

If the under-invested region can’t attract — and retain — people like Crawford to operate the continent’s most productive shale fields, the decline of America’s energy influence is only going to accelerate. Some shale bosses have already [started forecasting] the Permian Basin’s production peak by decade’s end, and a dearth of employees won’t help.

Part of the issue behind the city’s underinvestment is a small-government, fiscally conservative ethos that pervades the politics of West Texas, a Republican stronghold. But residents say there is also a quiet, underlying fear that the decade-old US shale boom could end as quickly as it started, turning the Permian into a ghost town almost overnight. Why spend tax dollars to improve a city, the thinking goes, when there’s a real feeling the bottom could still fall out?

“Unfortunately, a lot of people are always thinking, ‘when are we going to go down, when is the next bust cycle going to happen?’ So they’re afraid to really let some of that money go back into the community,” said Christine Foreman, president of the parent-teacher association at Midland High School. “They think, ‘we’re going to have a bust and everybody’s going to move away and then we’re going to have all this wasted infrastructure, wasted housing, wasted investment.’”

My patience is tested by the number of employees who have told me working for Diamondback was the best job they ever had, but they are moving because another destination offers them more than what they are receiving in Midland,” Stice wrote in [an op-ed] in the Midland Reporter-Telegram newspaper following the rejection. “How is Diamondback supposed to continue growing in a city that struggles to develop or grow with it?”

The schools are also a hard sell. One out of every three residents in the Permian reads below a third-grade level, Bentley said in written testimony before the US House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources earlier this year. Midland Independent School District spends $8,865 per student each year, according to National Center for Education Statistics data. If you ask NCES to compare that to US districts with similar demographics or other Texas cities, Midland is at the bottom of the list.

For now, companies in the region are just hoping the wages are enough to keep the workers coming — and prevent the existing workforce from packing their bags. 

That’s hard when even Foreman, the president of the parent-teacher association, is encouraging her three children to consider starting their families outside of Midland where she raised them.

“It’s frustrating as a citizen, as a parent, as somebody who grew up in Midland,” she said. “It’s frustrating to see us not reinvest in our community.”

These numbers show that the Permian, the largest U.S. field, suffers from infrastructure shortages. There is no faith, trust or belief in the producers to do right and turn the industry around. Or as People, Ideas & Objects et al provide in the Preliminary Specification, to work the “boom / bust” economy out of existence. Officers and directors take a lackadaisical, uncaring, and easy approach to “muddle through.”

” By “building balance sheets'' and “putting cash in the ground” we see their focus. It’s not business. It’s not common sense. It’s not constructive or productive. It’s just lazy. And most of all, the viable scapegoat in this article clearly identifies Midland City Council’s inability to invest in infrastructure. That’s why producers have to spend more on resources and resources are difficult to come by. 

Human nature forgives those that cause the biggest issues. However, they will prosecute those with the slightest indiscretion. An example of this is the current President and the alleged scandals his family is involved in. This can best be summarized as selling the United States to the highest bidder for personal gain. While the audacity of the former President to use Twitter is well beyond any social norm of acceptable civilized behavior. 

Officers and directors have been forgiven for their large indiscretions these past decades. The question then becomes, has the damage become so substantial that they’re now unable to rectify anything? Are they powerless and hopeless in their capabilities and capacities? Bloomberg suggests the Permian will face that in 2030. Officers and directors may ask, why am I here taking responsibility for this? As a result of the untenable situation they find themselves in, they may pursue greener pastures with fewer complications and difficulties. And perhaps most importantly, avoid accountability or responsibility for any looming difficulties their replacements may face. Having the wherewithal to say that it was in good shape when they left, and don’t know what their replacements have done. 

A historical example of this is when directors and officers leave, which was established during the 1929 Great Depression. In the past I’ve suggested they should invest in the development of the Preliminary Specification before they leave. Obviously, if the industry is in the state I suggest it is in, they won't do so. Funding People, Ideas & Objects would be a tacit admission that their job hasn't been done. They will therefore exit quietly in the crowd of other producers officer and directors as they too exit. Therefore who can People, Ideas & Objects appeal to for funding? If there is no one, does this leave the Preliminary Specification orphaned? 

If natural gas prices were maintained from September 2022 to the end of the first quarter of 2023? What would the differential be in terms of what producers' officers and directors gave up? I’ve calculated it to be a loss of over $72 billion for the quarter. However, that remains a faint shadow of the amount lost over the past four decades with at least a dozen outright oil or gas price collapses. And the chronic overproduction that has plagued the industry for years has depressed prices. These losses are what People, Ideas & Objects have focused on since August 2004. And as the Bloomberg article suggests we should have spent our time more productively convincing Midland’s City Council to pass the Hogan Park upgrade spending.  That is the issue the industry is focused on. From the same Bloomberg article. 

A couple of years ago, some residents thought they’d found a solution to the city’s inaction: fund public-space improvements with private money. A non-profit called Quality of Place Conservancy — led by Jeff Beard, vice president of business development at Midland-based driller CrownQuest Operating LLC — proposed a $55 million upgrade to the city’s historic Hogan Park. It would feature new sprawling sports fields, playgrounds, trails, a splash pad, pavilion, food trucks and more. Under the plan, $45 million would come from private investment, while the city would fund $10 million and have final approval over how the project moved forward — the sort of public-private partnership Texas towns bolster to try to build ambitious projects that taxpayer dollars alone wouldn’t be able to afford. By January, when the Midland City Council was set to vote on the proposal, $28.5 million of private investment had already been locked in, Beard said. Still, the council rejected it in a 4-2 decision, citing concerns over how the city would pay its portion and how the project would be governed.

The industry's challenges will continue to manifest while producers "muddle through." And they clearly admit that even the Permian will diminish by 2030. There may be a reason to justify industry leadership exit. If so, what would be done at that point?  

What People, Ideas & Objects Preliminary Specification brings to the table. A multi-trillion dollar value proposition based on two identifiable and quantifiable attributes. $5.7 trillion in higher profitability over the next 25 years through our price maker strategy that produces only profitable production, everywhere and always. Secondly the cycling of cash through the producer firms by realizing the capital costs of oil & gas exploration and production. This is done by passing the producer's capital costs on to the consumer. To do so in a competitive manner with the North American capital markets.

There is as much value in the intangible, unidentifiable and unquantifiable attributes of the Preliminary Specifications business model contained within our seven Organizational Constructs. These form a strong cultural structure for people who work within the industry. This structure allows them to rely upon and build incremental value for the producers, its people, the industry, all of its service and tertiary industries. Profitability drives prosperity. This business model identifies and addresses today’s issues and provides a foundation for tomorrow's financial, operational and political difficulties.

What should have been a continuing year of building on 2022's limited success has revealed a shocking lack of swimwear. We should not be surprised as the industry's financial foundation crumbled long ago. It may enjoy successful days here and there, and that will sustain those that have benefited from it the most. However, taking advantage of a primary industry in this way shows the irresponsible and reckless methods culturally developed by executives in this industry. I don’t think the situation is viable on a go-forward basis and I am encouraged that the WSJ graph shows that I’m not wrong from at least 2008. There has been a significant degeneration of motivation, faith, trust and goodwill throughout the industry, and the individuals responsible are the directors and officers. I have identified the issues, opportunities and solutions since well before 2008 and they only vilified and ostracized People, Ideas & Objects. I do not say that to solicit sympathy, only to show the culpability of those responsible who knew better and chose the route to destroy what was not theirs. This was so that each of them could continue to profit financially. Officers and directors may want to identify what we’ve described as their long list of viable scapegoats as the culprits. Which now include the Midland City Council and those “‘One out of every three residents in the Permian reads below a third-grade level,’ Bentley said in written testimony before the US House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources earlier this year.” However I only see this as a continuation of their despicable behavior.