A key element of the Oilfield Service business is keeping track of the services rendered, the customer, and the details about the services that affect invoicing. Similar needs are encountered by most businesses (oil companies), even if their cost accounting is mostly internal.
The oil and gas industry has a heavy regulatory requirement to track the details of their land and acquisitions, permitting, exploration, production, and distribution. In addition to acquiring and reporting these details, the regulatory requirements mandate that the details be accessible from storage for defined periods of time.
Activity detail tracking is critical to efficient management. For example, an organizations lessons learned are sometimes reflected in changed business practices. This learning often takes the form of noting patterns among recorded data. A key proprietary asset of any business is the set of best practices it uses. Benefit can accrue if we could automate more of the learning loop between descriptions of standard practices, the resulting actual experiences, and the feedback to improvements in the standard practices.
Activity detail tracking can also be used to track dependencies among data. The outputs of a computing activity depend on the inputs. When the inputs themselves later require correction, if we have the data dependency graph (explained in detail in a later section), we can identify the dependent data that needs to be recalculated and the operations and decisions where all the changed data was used.
Activity detail tracking potentially provides valuable data about data, such as how much confidence is justified in the data. We could place more confidence in a seismic velocity model that was calibrated with well checkshot data or sonic log data, than one derived from seismics alone. Hence, our ability to quantify uncertainty depends on associating data with the activities that have been applied to it. This relation between activity and data is particularly important in the oil and gas business where uncertainty and risk management plays such a pivotal role in the conduct of an oil company business.
Activity detail tracking also provides the key to quantifying the cumulative costs, and ultimately the business value of data, if the data can be tied to its application in business planning and decision-making. Hence, activity tracking is the key to data portfolio management: what data is really useful and cost-effective in the conduct of business? Since this varies by region and business practice, the driving data must be captured from live use.
Finally, history tells us that unless we provide a strong and well-documented model to represent concepts like data auditing, activity accounting, data versioning, and so on, application developers will meet their needs in these areas in diverse and incompatible ways. Standardizing on representation is the key to consistent usage, and enabling simple utilities to operate on, and derive value from this data.