Many software companies have user group meetings at which users make suggestions for improvement. Microsoft has taken this concept one step further, inviting major oil and service companies to join an alliance to change the way business is done in the upstream oil and gas industry.

The initiative, called the Microsoft Upstream Reference Architecture (MURA), was announced in June of 2010 with 12 partners. By February of 2011 it had mushroomed to 29 partners. “In those few months we have made some key progress in terms of partners, industry uptake, customer engagement, tangible results, and collateral assets,” said Paul Nguyen, industry technology strategist, Worldwide Oil & Gas Industry for Microsoft.

MURA is not meant to be a software release. Rather, it is an alliance based on give-and-take between Microsoft and the MURA partners to identify IT issues and enable solutions. Software companies have learned the hard way that prescriptive solutions rarely address the right problems. Ali Ferling, managing director, Worldwide Oil & Gas Industry Group for Microsoft, said a survey of top-level industry managers asked what types of companies are best positioned to help them with their IT issues. “Their answer was, ‘Nobody can help us. We have to do it ourselves.’” So MURA has evolved as a roadmap for a new IT infrastructure.

“We’re looking at the key aspects in terms of adoption and trying to make this real and pragmatic,” Nguyen said. “We looked at various business areas and the services to E&P business processes. At the same time, we looked at what’s out there today and what problems our customers are trying to solve, their touch points.

“By identifying those touch points, we can focus on the immediate needs of the industry.”

According to a 2010 Microsoft and Accenture study, information overload in the form of siloed, redundant, and unstructured data often hinders proactive operations and collaboration. (Images courtesy of Microsoft)

Business drivers

The oil and gas industry is overwhelmed with data due to the abundance of sensors. Data are gathered from the exploration phase through the producing life of a field, and the systems in place for analyzing those data are often not up to the task. And while asset teams have replaced silos in most companies, the IT infrastructure has not always kept pace.

A white paper about MURA identifies several drivers for a more efficient architecture:

  • Delivering more with less. Companies must be able to deliver more throughput with fewer resources, and geologists, geophysicists, and engineers must be able to spend more time doing domain-focused work;
  • Integrated views. Workers need a way to view all data for a particular situation;
  • Easily accessible key performance indicators. Ideally, managers should be able to see, on a single screen, a portfolio of current opportunities, which are ready to drill, what rigs are available, and prospect peer reviews. They can then focus their time on underperforming assets or teams;
  • Plug-and play technology. This would enable companies to incorporate new software applications without having to overhaul their entire system. It would reduce the constraints on IT, give companies access to best-of-breed solutions, and reduce the time needed to deploy new solutions; and
  • Integration of structured and unstructured data. Structured data come from industry-specific applications, while unstructured data can take the form of a Word document, e-mail, or voice mail. This requirement addresses the fact that much of the information needed to manage upstream projects is unstructured.

To enable this evolution, oil companies need to embrace industry standards and to take advantage of emerging technology outside the industry. For instance, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a flexible alternative to traditional hard connections between applications and their data sources. “SOA is a collection of connected services that communicate with one another,” the white paper states. “These services may communicate one-to-one, passing data back and forth, or may communicate among several services, which includes the ability to make applications that might use the services ‘aware’ of their existence.”

Cloud computing is another emerging technology that has obvious benefits for the complexity of upstream operations. Using the Internet to access data rather than warehousing data in large on-premise infrastructures saves money, ensures easier access, and still provides needed security.

Finally, social media technologies such as status updates, messages, blogs, and wikis can foster cross-discipline collaboration and better management of the upstream business environment.

Implementing MURA

While Microsoft is providing the blueprint for the architecture, oil companies have to implement the ideas. The white paper offers a few suggestions.

First of all, start small. The paper suggests picking a domain process such as well reviews and building the infrastructure, connectivity, and processes needed within an integrated, service-oriented environment.

The focus should be on business processes and building robust data management into those processes. “If a process includes data on a well to be drilled in the future, formulate a solution that transfers that updated information to any application that uses data on well counts, production volumes, or other relevant metrics,” the paper states. “If the process is exploration-focused, concentrate on the search, discovery, and collaboration aspects of the process to enable a robust discussion and consideration of the various insights and innovation each discipline, partner, or vendor brings to the dialog.”

The conceptual illustration of MURA is based on a service-oriented computing environment that encompasses the integration of domain applications, business productivity tools, and back office applications.

Also, data models should present information in ways that engineers and geoscientists understand.

Finally, companies should maintain a “system of record” for data. “It makes little sense to create additional databases or to gather all data into a temporary data warehouse to support daily work processes,” the paper states. “Rather, seek to establish an integrated, service-oriented data model that recognizes where information is stored, easily accesses needed data, and serves up that information efficiently to systems, employees, and managers. Create data warehouses only when they can deliver and improve the speed and performance of the end-user experience.”

The future of MURA

Nguyen said the hope is that software vendors will embrace this approach and develop products that cater to the plug-and-play approach. “We see a strong need for vendors to deliver their solutions so that they can be plugged in to these integrated solutions with minimal effort on the customer’s side,” he said. Microsoft refers to this as a “composite user interface.” Nguyen said the company is implementing demonstrations using commercial products. Already companies like Esri and PointCross are implementing these ideas.

“Our guidance is on providing specific instructions on how to build these components so that a vendor can package its products such that a customer can just purchase them and implement them,” he said.

Instead of requiring in-house developers to integrate the new programs, they can simply be dragged and dropped into the existing infrastructure. “There’s no programming involved, and there’s no coding,” Nguyen said. “It’s just like how you would compose a document in Word. Now you’re composing your applications.

“Having all of these parties involved with us in the initiative has really helped the approach.”

To access the white paper, visit www.microsoft.com/mura.