Read about how IBM can help companies implement business optimization through Information On Demand, Information Infrastructure solutions, and Business Analytics and Optimization.

1. Information Led Transformation
The Information Agenda Guide for Chemicals and Petroleum
Accelerate your Information Led Transformation

2. Trusted information is a strategic asset
Leaders from around the world are focused more better informed, real-time decisions as they turn
than ever on the economic, social and environmental their information into a strategic driver to accelerate
implications of global integration, where free trade innovation, business optimization and competitive
agreements, the Internet and globalization are making differentiation.
the world simultaneously smaller, flatter and smarter.
When built on a foundation of trusted information
The systems and processes that enable goods to
that can be shared, re-used and applied as a
be developed, manufactured, bought and sold, and
strategic asset, an information-led transformation
services that deliver everything from electricity, finan-
allows organizations to optimize every transaction,
cial transactions and efficient healthcare systems,
process and decision at the point of greatest impact.
to name a few, are driving us to become a smarter
In doing so, they can move analysis from a back
planet.
office operation limited to business analyst experts to
What all of this means is that for the first time in his- an approach that enables everyone in optimize their
tory, almost anything can become digitally aware and decisions based on real-time, predictive analytics.
interconnected. This brings major implications for the It can deliver immediate and cumulative value with
value that can be derived from such systems. With so each step, resulting in sustainable practices and
much technology and networking abundantly avail- processes that create a smarter organization; one
able at such low cost, what wouldn’t you put smart that can make better informed decisions ranging from
technology into? What service wouldn’t you provide a everyday moves to major strategic bets.
customer, citizen, student or patient? What wouldn’t
you connect? What information wouldn’t you mine for This thought is not lost on chemicals and petroleum
insight? companies. Just a 1.5% increase in recovery from
existing wells would yield enough oil for half a year’s
The foremost issue facing enterprises today is the global consumption, lowering the cost of fuel—which
waste, inaccuracy and volume of missed opportuni- would mean lower prices for travel, homes, food and
ties that stem from the single root cause of information consumer products. Put simply, we need smarter
raging out of control. oil and gas fields. And that means gathering and
managing real-time data from across the entire
This information explosion is creating challenges, but
production stream, in vast quantities. One oil field
forward-thinking organizations are turning it into an
alone can generate the equivalent of 200 DVDs’
opportunity. They are leveraging information to identify
worth of data per day. Making sense of all this
opportunities for profitable growth, cost take-out,
information is critical for better decision-making—
and proactive risk management. They are pursuing
about exploration, production and management.
an information-led transformation to help them make
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3. Trusted information is a strategic asset In a recent survey of CEOs from chemicals and petroleum
There is unprecedented change taking place in the chemicals companies, it was recognized that significant change is
and petroleum industry today. Consumer and regulatory inevitable, even desirable. CEOs were concerned, however,
pressures are driving more and more industry innovations, about their ability to manage that change. Having an
including consolidation, green energy initiatives, energy Information Agenda™ creates an enterprise-wide vision that
trading and carbon credit trading. Companies are struggling will allow them to execute and manage that change with the
with replacing an aging infrastructure, installing an intelligent desired result in mind.
utilities network, managing information from an aging
workforce, increased regulatory oversight, concerns over As a result, chemicals and petroleum companies are
cyber security, planning and managing new construction and launching new initiatives designed to drive new intelligence,
pressure to improve financial performance, all while satisfying business optimization and ongoing competitive advantage
an increasing demand for better customer service. through improved recovery rates, automatic, remote field
monitoring and reduced workforce strain – and these initiatives
In addition, customers continue to look to their chemicals and all depend on information.
petroleum companies to take a lead role in environmental
issues. The companies that prosper will be those that are Information On Demand
perceived to take a leadership role in environmental issues. Information On Demand is a comprehensive set of information
management solutions that help companies optimize
The key to managing these activities is successfully managing business performance. Chemicals and petroleum companies
all of the information in your enterprise. Successful chemicals can optimize business performance through Information
and petroleum companies will be those that find a way to On Demand which results in improvements in operations,
make their information work as a strategic resource. Those efficiency, reliability and service.
that don’t have a plan will be frustrated and overwhelmed with
increasing volumes of information. It is critical to be able to access, analyze and control
information, within time frames that are required for a
Chemicals and petroleum companies have been investing chemicals or petroleum company to manage and operate
in point solutions to improve individual aspects of the in real-time. Chemicals and petroleum companies can use
business. However, new initiatives must go beyond efficiency information to:
improvements, focusing instead on better understanding of the
business, optimizing assets, reducing outages, involving the • Better operate and maintain their assets
customers, improving financial performance and managing
• Increase reserves
regulatory interactions.
• Better manage partnerships
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4. • Improve worker productivity In establishing an Information Agenda for the organization,
• Gain insight into their customers the CIO, working with line of business colleagues, puts
• Improve the quality and results of their regulatory information to work to achieve both short-term and long-term
interactions strategic changes.
• Improve customer service
An effective Information Agenda helps organizations achieve
This level of challenge and coordination can only be achieved several key objectives:
through a common information management strategy.
• Identify data and content that are vital to the organization
• Identify how, when and where information should be
Information On Demand in action: Opportunities for
made available
Chemicals and Petroleum Industry Optimization
• Determine data management processes and governance
practices
Oil and Gas
• Identify and prioritize the information projects that deliver
• Increase recovery of oil in place
the most return
• Facilitate high-impact teaming
• Align information use to match the organization’s
• Convert data into actionable knowledge and broadly
business strategy
deploy it
• Create and deploy an information infrastructure that
meets both immediate and future needs
Chemical and Refineries
• Become a Globally Integrated Enterprise
• Increase effectiveness of Business Intelligence
• Leverage excellence in forecasting and analytics The Information Agenda Guide for Chemicals and Petroleum
IBM ® accelerates the process and minimizes the risk for
• Drive high-impact execution in capital programs
creating an Information Agenda through industry-specific
• Create advantage from health, safety, security and
Information Agenda Guides. IBM’s Information Agenda Guide
environmental initiatives
for Chemicals and Petroleum is a practical, proven approach
for turning a client’s Information On Demand vision and
strategy into reality.
An Information Agenda
For organizations that want to get started on the path
to Information On Demand and establish a foundation
for new intelligence but do not know where to begin, an
Information Agenda is needed. An Information Agenda is a
comprehensive, enterprise-wide plan that explains how to take
the information being generated across, and even outside of,
the organization and put it to use to better run the business.
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5. CIOs, working with their line of business colleagues, can Information Strategy Enterprise Information
Information Strategy Infrastructure
build a best-in-class information management vision for their Creates a vision to guide
decisions and help the Identifies the technology
components and capabilities to
organization determine how
establish a common information
organization and create a detailed roadmap to realize it. The best to support business goals
framework
Enterprise
goal is to transform the organization to unlock the business Information Information Information
Governance Agenda Infrastructure
value of information for competitive advantage, enabling
Information Governance Roadmap
organizations to deliver trusted, accurate information to
Implements policies and practices Establish a plan for executing
optimize business performance. for managing, using, improving and
protecting information across the
Roadmap discrete projects to realize short-
and long-term return on investment
organization
The Information Agenda Guide for Chemicals and Petroleum
can help direct businesses as they develop their own an organization’s existing information architecture, and the
Information Agenda in a matter of weeks through Information objectives that are of most importance to the business, an
Agenda workshops. The Information Agenda Guide addresses organization’s final Information Agenda roadmap can contain
the four key components of an Information Agenda and some or all of these projects.
ensures that they work in conjunction with each other. It
Figure 2. The Information Agenda Guide for Chemicals and Petroleum: a proven
involves key stakeholders across the organization to explore
approach for turning an Information On Demand vision and strategy into reality.
and address these four key components and ensures that they
work together (see Figure 1): Information strategy — recognizing the big picture
At its highest level, the Information Agenda Guide for Chemicals
• Information Strategy: The vision that guides decisions and Petroleum incorporates best industry practices to assist
and helps the organization determine how best to in identification of the primary information-centric business
support business goals imperatives that drive virtually every business decision. Based
upon working with customers and experiences in chemicals
• Information Infrastructure: The technology components
and capabilities needed to establish a common
information framework
• Information Governance: The policies and practices
that facilitate the management, usage, improvement and
protection of information across lines of business
• Roadmap: A phased execution plan for transforming the
organization
Figure 1. An effective Information Agenda provides a strategic vision and a
phased plan that enables energy and utility companies to align the use of
information with the organization’s business strategy.
As figure 1 indicates, the Information Agenda for Chemicals
and Petroleum identifies crucial IT projects that establish
the necessary information infrastructure and then leverage
that infrastructure to help produce measurable business
results identified by the business objective. Depending on
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6. Information Governance – enhancing information quality,
availability and integrity
As a crucial component of the Information Agenda Guide,
the information governance portion assists a chemical or
petroleum company to establish standards for data quality,
management processes and accountability. These help to
improve business performance via standard definitions and
processes that establish a more disciplined approach to
managing data and information across the enterprise.
The Information Agenda Guide for Chemicals and Petroleum
applies best practices, based upon IBM’s extensive
experience in the chemicals and petroleum industry, for
creating information governance policies. It leverages existing
policies and procedures to create an environment that can
more consistently and confidently manage information, thereby
and petroleum, the outer ring of the guide above reflects the obtaining maximum value from these assets in support of the
industry imperatives that chemicals and petroleum companies strategic imperatives.
address to optimize their business.
The next ring details the specific business optimization Information infrastructure — creating, managing and delivering
objectives associated with individual business imperatives. For trusted information
example, improving asset operations and availability has direct All business imperatives and business optimization objectives
financial performance impact as well as improving compliance depend upon a common information infrastructure that
with health, safety and environmental regulations. enables a chemicals or petroleum company to more
effectively create, capture, manage and utilize information
The business imperatives and business optimization associated with customers, services, operations, products and
objectives are the foundational components used to help market strategy. An effective information infrastructure allows a
set the vision and strategy for an organization’s Information
Agenda. These foundational components ensure that you have
a well-established bridge between IT objectives and overall
corporate objectives. They provide both line of business
colleagues and IT colleagues with a common language to
communicate about all projects and plans moving forward.
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7. chemicals or petroleum company to:
1. Manage information over its lifetime — Reducing
the costs associated with managing information while
controlling access, expanding retention and increasing
compliance.
2. Optimize content, process and compliance
management — Better tuning system performance and
improving decision-making by injecting timely, trusted
information into business operations.
3. Establish an accurate, trusted view of information
over time — A flexible architecture can leverage
existing IT investments to produce accurate and trusted
information that is consistent across sources, facilitating
better analytics and sound business decisions. can accommodate both short and long term objectives.
4. Plan, understand and optimize business performance Roadmap – bringing it all together with a step-by-step execution
— Leveraging trusted information to build plans, plan for creating an Information Agenda
understand how business is performing and focus on The roadmap gives information management and integration
optimizing performance across the enterprise. efforts direction and cohesion. It spells out the priority,
order and timeframe of IT projects necessary to achieve
5. Provide solutions that drive operational efficiency — the organization’s crucial information-enabled business
Information infrastructure solutions focus on information optimization objectives. The first step in creating the roadmap
compliance, security, availability and retention, providing is identifying and prioritizing the underlying IT projects—
an infrastructure environment that is highly scalable, usually combinations of software and services—that can help
standards-based, flexible and essential to handling achieve each business imperative.
today’s most information intensive business challenges.
Figure 3: Addressing Common Key Information Requirements. Figure 4. An example prescriptive roadmap of IT projects to achieve operational
excellence.
As the journey towards Information On Demand evolves,
IT Projects for Operational Excellence
guiding principals will be applied to leverage existing
Improving asset operations and asset availability, optimizing
assets and IT purchase decisions with these key common
the supply chain, and reducing capital costs are top concerns
information requirements in mind. The journey will include
for virtually all chemicals and petroleum companies. Optimizing
looking for opportunities to use existing IT assets as common
exploration is also critical.
components to be utilized for other projects and will provide
guidelines that help ensure that new technology investments
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8. involved continues to grow.
Proof of compliance is sometimes proactive (evidence must
be produced for known occasions) and sometimes reactive
(i.e., after an incident or a random audit). In either case,
proving compliance requires bringing together information
that provides proof of compliance as well as the auditing of
compliance processes. In some cases the regulatory interaction
is a continuous, ongoing activity requiring on-site inspectors.
At the core of all regulatory interactions is the ability to provide
trusted and verifiable information that may come from many
different sources. From a financial perspective it is important
that these discovery activities can be accomplished in a cost-
effective manner.
Figure 5. An example prescriptive roadmap of IT projects to manage regulatory
interactions.
Supporting operation and maintenance personnel with
information they need in order to perform their job function is
crucial, including those mobile workers who need information Figure 6. An example prescriptive roadmap of IT projects to manage global
relations.
out in the field. By having a common, easily accessible
repository for all of the information needed to operate assets
IT Projects For Managing Global Relations
(drawings, procedures, vendor manuals, inspection reports,
service bulletins and the like), both planned and unplanned
maintenance activities can be improved, resulting in increased
availability of assets. By documenting the processes involved
it is easier to train new workers and contractors.
Effectively managing the supply chain will improve both
financial and operational results. Better control and
management of capital projects will result in reduced
capital expenditures and improve visibility and insight into
project execution.
IT Projects for Regulatory Interactions
Chemicals and petroleum companies are among the most
highly regulated companies in the world. Whether it is financial
regulation (Sarbanes-Oxley), environmental (emerging
greenhouse gas restraints), operational compliance
(evolving cyber security regulations) or health or safety
regulations, the number of regulations and regulators
Managing far-flung operations is challenging. By bringing
structured and unstructured data together to create
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9. Alternate energy investments isn’t just good PR, it can be a
profitable growth option. It requires an Information Agenda to
effectively manage alternate energy projects. These initiatives
are often a mixture of capital investment and fiscal incentives.
The Information Agenda Guide for Energy and Utilities
accelerates roadmap creation with best practice templates
for specific IT projects. They are pre-configured to
accommodate industry-specific business optimization
objectives and initiatives, allowing organizations to quickly
organize and prioritize IT projects within the framework of
their Information Agenda.
Figure 7. An example prescriptive roadmap of IT projects to create profitable
growth.
information, a much more comprehensive view of the The Power of an Information Agenda Approach
worldwide enterprise is possible. With an Information Agenda for chemicals and petroleum
Managing partnerships is also a global challenge. Being able
to collaborate with partners becomes critical to the success of
the relationship. Often these partnerships are very dynamic,
so using accurate, current and trusted information is critical to
the success of partnerships.
IT Projects to Create Profitable Growth
For chemical and petroleum companies increasing recovery
can be a very profitable proposition. Managing the information
about producing properties can be an effective way to
increase yields.
in place, CIOs have many of the tools needed to make the
essential transition from simply supporting the business
to making a measurable, sustainable contribution to the
business’ bottom line. The Information Agenda Guide for
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10. Chemicals and Petroleum supplies the integrated vision
needed to help achieve the business goals and objectives of
a converged business model — and deliver better business
outcomes. These outcomes can range from improving the
availability of revenue producing assets, reducing maintenance
costs and demonstrating compliance, to demonstrating
leadership in corporate social responsibility programs.
The benefits — competitive advantage through business
optimization
Using the Information Agenda Guide can help chemicals and
petroleum companies:
• Provide an integrated view of trusted information The Information Agenda Guide for Chemicals and Petroleum
is a practical, accelerated and proven approach developed
• Increase asset availability and hence revenues
by IBM after years of experience of working with leading
• Improve safety of operations
global organizations. It is a cross-IBM program composed of a
• Increase customer insight and customer satisfaction proven, prescriptive methodology and mature chemicals and
• Support new strategic initiatives with an integrated petroleum assets delivered by IBM practitioners with deep
information framework industry expertise.
• Improve regulatory compliance
IBM Information On Demand and Information Infrastructure
• Reduce bad debt by better understanding the customer
solutions offer end-to-end information infrastructure
• Capture and manage information from an aging
capabilities for executing your Information Agenda. Information
workforce
On Demand and Information Infrastructure offerings have
• Manage energy and carbon credit trading activities been specifically designed to address virtually every aspect
Most important, consistently delivering trusted information to of an organization’s trusted information needs. Based on
the right people at the right time gives organizations the ability open standards and reflecting an investment of over US$10
to use that information and the intelligence derived from it in billion in the last three years, Information On Demand and
entirely new ways, providing real competitive advantage for a Information Infrastructure offerings are among the industry’s
smarter planet. most comprehensive.
Why IBM is the Right Transformation Partner IBM’s Business Analytics and Optimization leverages the
IBM’s unparalleled combination of pure science, deep industry unique capabilities of IBM Research, which, when combined
knowledge and technology expertise makes it uniquely with our world-class software solutions, foundational business
qualified to help business discover a new kind of intelligence. intelligence, performance management and advanced
Only IBM offers the industry accelerators, enabling analytics, accelerate client time-to-value. Business Analytics
technologies and deep expertise with a proven approach and Optimization helps businesses make better decisions
necessary to do so. faster while optimizing operations, either by eliminating costs
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11. or transforming business processes. Ultimately, Business Analytics and Optimization © Copyright IBM Corporation 2009
helps predict outcomes with greater certainty and uncover opportunities that were
once unknown and unattainable. IBM Corporation
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CIOs and senior IT managers ready to jump-start their organization’s Information U.S.A.
Agenda efforts should consider a hosted IBM Information Agenda workshop.
This workshop leverages IBM’s expertise to guide CIOs, senior IT managers, and Produced in the United States of America
05-09
line of business stakeholders quickly through the process of building a cohesive All Rights Reserved
Information Agenda with an actionable set of projects to execute. A hosted workshop
can result in faster execution and quicker realization of return on investment. IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, Smarter Planet and
the smarter planet icon and Information Agenda
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For more information International Business Machines Corporation
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