There's no denying that connected worker technology is an explosive force in the oil and gas and petrochemical industries - a fast-growing market projected to reach $21.9 billion globally by 2028, according to a recent study conducted by Polaris.
That kind of impact doesn't come without a number of significant challenges in field operations that must be addressed and overcome to help organizations reap the greatest rewards of implementing connected worker technology across its systems.
According to Daniel Paul, director of connected operations for ConocoPhillips, some of those challenges are rooted in a company's culture.
It's "really hard," Paul said, for organizations to focus on how to most efficiently and effectively implement change, and it's especially difficult to sync obsolete processes with new technology that offers greater capabilities.
"This industry has been around for so long, and there's a lot of institutional knowledge, especially in field operations on how work is done, managed, tasked and reassigned," Paul said. "It's a big cultural change organizationally to implement field service management to a connected-worker type of workflow."
Paul observed that the workforce, regardless of industry, is made up of a "wide spectrum of personalities."
"We have people who have been with an organization for a long time, and they've been doing a task in a specific way for so long," he said, comparing more experienced workers with younger recruits. "They are used to using phones for everything they do. They have grown up playing with this type of capability, so they want more mobility and technology."
Paul also pointed to a notion of "Big Brother" that often accompanies digital connectivity that may be viewed as "over-managing a worker's task," which can threaten the worker's autonomy.
"Once again, that goes to the culture of the behavior," Paul said. "You're talking about resistance that could stem from the lack of interest in the technology, or that it's just another [perceived threat] from technology."
Another challenge on the technical front, Paul said, is data integration, cleanup and accuracy.
"This field service management and connected worker is trying to deliver data that is reliable, useful and helpful and makes changes and task management better. All of that is [built] on an important foundation of data," Paul said. "In our company, we've found that can be challenging. It requires a great delivery process to make this a solution that can be deployed effectively, efficiently and successfully."
Finding the 'sweet spot'
Luke Skaarup, director of northern region operations for Enbridge Gas, said industry as a whole is "on this journey of providing more access to information and collecting more data from employees."
The greatest challenge, Skaarup said, is trying to find that "sweet spot" in terms of how much data needs to be collected.
"What is the user experience of the folks in the field? We can ask our field representatives to collect 100 different points of data, but that might turn a 15-minute job into a 30-minute job," Skaarup said. "And then, what's the value in collecting all that information? It's a baseless point if you [already] have reliable, useful information there."
Another sometimes problematic task can be the integration of systems, Skaarup noted.
"The basic mindset is 'more data is better.' It gives you more power and more opportunity to do things," he said. "But we're finding that it can become inherently difficult to transition some of that legacy information over to new systems where some of the platforms aren't truly aligned.
"You have to find that 'sweet spot.' What is the user experience, and how does that integrate across different platforms as you move forward?"
Skaarup shared that Enbridge Gas is currently in the process of simultaneously integrating two large legacy utilities so the company is "working through all of these sorts of things."
"For me, the next steps of this are finding the most efficient ways to collect data at the right time, and making sure we've got that user experience to support safe, reliable operations," he concluded.
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