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Create value from data democratization

Data democratization means that everyone has access to data and there are no gatekeepers that create a bottleneck at the gateway to the data. The goal is to have anybody use data at any time to make decisions without barriers to access or understanding. This is already happening in the oil & gas industry, but the industry needs to work more on value creation on top of the data itself.

This is nothing new. In the early 2000’s for example, I started a software company in Location Based Services for outdoor activities. At that time, we needed to access maps to visualize activity locations. Map data originated from multiple sources which were difficult or expensive to access. In 2005 Google changed it all when they made a massive map database available (Google Maps) with a free and open Application Programming Interface (API). This fueled a massive software innovation on top of map data that combined other data sources and algorithms to create strong growth in user values. Today, we consume map-fueled solutions in our daily life without thinking about the time before map data became easily available. Just think about our daily lives with traffic advice, local weather forecasts, store locators, and activity tracking. In industry, maps are used for office locations, asset tracking, augmented reality and much more.

The oil & gas industry is now creating their own “maps” generated by software solutions that gather data from independent sources and make it available through APIs. Open APIs make data available for external consumption while it before was only contained in non-accessible silos. Innovations have started to create user values that matter for the industry. There is a need for new software tools that will do more with less resources. We will continue to see growth in the number of innovations in areas such as production surveillance, production optimization and equipment monitoring/maintenance. The winning innovations will prove their user value and be scalable.

Scalability is about the right technology stack – technology that is accessible, quick to implement, and easy to maintain – combined with a working business model.

In Turbulent Flux we have built the next generation, scalable flow simulation software to create concrete user values on top of production data. The software uses available production data to calculate production critical flow information and enable increased production with optimized operations. The software is accessible through an open API published on the web to facilitate innovation and easy adoption. This enables the industry to effectively take advantage of production data as digital transformation changes the way we consume and act on available information.

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