MANAGEMENT BARRIERS IN IMPLEMENTATION OF INTEGRATED OPERATIONS SOLUTIONS IN INDIAN UPSTREAM COMPANIES

The Upstream Oil and Gas industry in India was quick in embracing new technology and digital innovation even back in the 1980s. Scholar's first Upstream Oil & Gas (O&G) job back in 1990 as the Offshore Complex Shift In-charge managing Oil & Gas operations through partly automated DCS (Distributed Control System) is a personal testimony to it. Integrated Operation (IO) term was coined (Rosendahl et al, 2013) by Norwegian Upstream company Statoil around 2005 which was based on combined use of Data Integration based on open standards / Predictive Analytics / IIOT sensors (Wang, 2016), going beyond DCS (Distributed Control System), PLC (Programmabl Logic Controller) and any data historian or point software systems. IO solutions were developed as customized solutions for Upstream companies with an intelligent real time (or near real time) system helping decision makers to make quicker decisions with online monitoring of various work processes impacting revenue or cost performance of the organization. During the last one decade, after StatOil, various global upstream companies coined newer names for such IO initiatives and did get benefits but Digital Oilfield (DOF) (Patri, 2012) was another widely accepted name for IO in Upstream. Indian upstream companies have been trying to adapt this second wave of IO / DOF but have not yet taken full advantage of using data integration and analytics in a meaningful way. As per the survey, Cairn Energy has been one of the leaders in Digital Oilfield space in India but majority of the effort had been towards incremental performance improvements only through selective use of digital technologies. Motivation for this research was to understand the precise barriers faced by Indian upstream companies in adopting integrated operations / IIOT / Digital Transformation despite so many foreign players entering India because of NELP (New Exploration Licensing Policy) implementation after 90s with sole focus on bringing in new technology partners to increase the O&G production. In this paper, we have examined the management decision-making barriers for implementation of Integrated Operations solutions in Indian upstream companies based on Factor Analysis with the objective to expedite decision making beyond 4 categories of IO barriers resulting in improved organizational efficiency parameters (Moltu et al, 2010)