Tapping into Your Current Data Reserves

Abstract

Data analytics and Big Data have revolutionized many industries, especially where minor efficiencies result in significant cost savings. While Big Data is very important, this paper emphasizes use of low cost tools and techniques to provide valuable insight into data that organizations are already collecting. Organizations spend extensive effort collecting and managing data to support operational and business functions. These functions involve specific stakeholders making specific decisions within a specific timeframe. Within highly-mature functions, data is collected and processed to provide information, knowledge, and insight to its stakeholders; however, these functions are often siloed, limiting the utility (and sometimes visibility) of the data across the organization. An organization's data is a valuable asset. For limited additional effort, analysts can leverage this asset to provide unique insight. This paper explains tools and techniques that organizations can use to creatively capitalize on untapped potential. Broadly, the approach includes: Visualizing existing data to improve understanding - In recent years, data visualization software has become much more powerful, inexpensive, and easy to implement for generating and sharing results. Employing intuitive visualization enables analysts to consider multiple dimensions of an issue simultaneously to identify findings and anomalies. Identifying potential applications - By interacting with intuitive data visualizations, analysts can think creatively about use of data beyond its intended uses and posit questions for further exploration. Establishing context within and across datasets – Analysts can define relationships across datasets and analyze them collectively. Correlation analysis across datasets can reveal hidden relationships. Expanding or contracting the analysis time horizon of data can also bring trends to light. Depending on the application, analysts can build data-driven predictive models to simulate various scenarios to improve confidence in decision-making processes. This approach represents a philosophical change from "Is the data sufficient to answer a given question?" to "What questions can the given data answer?" This approach encourages exploration to reduce the opportunity cost of untapped data. This paper will illustrate this approach through a case studies using publicly-available offshore production and platform data.