While admitting "decentralization" is something of a challenge to his company's application of digital solutions to deliver business insights and compelling end-user experiences, Joshua Flowers, manager of Market Intelligence for Chevron, balances that challenge with a definite strength.
"One thing that's made it very successful for us is that we partnered with the business users, and they really told us what they wanted and what they were using," Flowers said. "We were able to build and deploy that back to them in an automated, digital solution."
From left are Chevron's Manager of Market Intelligence Joshua Flowers, Manager of Supply Chain Innovation Delivery Paul Littlefield and Business Intelligence Team Lead Jonathan Luquette.
This partnership among experienced business users, team members and business analysts "and understanding how they were going to use it" has made Chevron's adoption of digital solutions easier, Flowers said, discussing how to leverage advanced analytics, cognitive capabilities and design thinking at the 2018 Oil and Gas Supply Chain and Procurement Summit held recently in Houston.
"That was very valuable in terms of delivering a solution," he said.
A notable positive lesson learned in deploying these analytic solutions, Flowers said, is "making sure that we work with the business" rather than imposing a "what the corporate report wants" attitude.
"That has not been very successful in terms of how it's been rolled out, because there's always a reason why some business users are different," he said.
Chevron Business Intelligence Team Lead Jonathan Luquette added that "this mass visibility of data" has made two large impacts.
"One is it really makes it easy to spot data quality issues and data inconsistencies," he said. "Whereas before you may have had a time of combing through spreadsheets with millions of rows to figure it out, now, with this instantaneous visualization in real time, it's very easy to spot."
The other important impact Luquette addressed is that Chevron's chief information officer (CIO) has given the company an imperative about its data.
"It's that Chevron's data is a Chevron asset," Luquette explained. "It's not your data; it's our data. And because we're so siloed, people tend to not want you 'looking at my stuff.'"
Driving the culture
The CIO's imperative directing that data be shared within the company has "actually driven some of the culture change that has been so difficult to enact at Chevron throughout all levels," Luquette said, adding that this level of accessibility and availability "is a new thing for us."
"Now that we have these imperatives backing us up and we're starting to show things to everyone, people are actually finding benefits," he said. "We found that people were able to actually leverage that [information] right away to learn from other business units and change and improve their own operations based on things that hadn't happened to them yet. That sort of thing furthers that culture shift, which otherwise would be very difficult."
Asked if Chevron applies RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted and informed) or other processes to redefine and then confirm and document changed business processes, Paul Littlefield, manager of Supply Chain Innovation Delivery for Chevron, said the company has certain processes documented -- "some more consistently than others."
The contracting space requires "a lot of discipline in terms of documentation," but there's less documentation in the business analysts' space, he said.
"I think that's actually a good thing. Keep it organic; keep it self-service," he concluded. "There's a lot of citizen development opportunities out there where people do what they think they need to do to solve their business problems. Let them do it; don't put a whole lot of controls around them. I think that's where we've had success."
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