Hello GIS, it's been a while
I've been away from the GIS scene for a while - the last European Petroleum GIS Conference (ePUG) I attended was in 2015, just as the downturn really started to bite. Now I'm back working in the oil & gas patch, I thought I'd go along the 2018 ePUG and see what's changed.
First impressions
It's obvious the oil & gas industry is still feeling the pain of the downturn. Numbers here certainly felt down on when I last attended, and the atmosphere a little subdued. However, as always, the ePUG Committee, along with ESRI, had put together a thoroughly professional event. Talking to some of those involved, it had certainly been challenging given where we're at in cycle. Kudos to Thierry Gregorius and the rest of the team for making it happen.
GIS has been 'Digitally Transformed'
When I last went to one of these ESRI-led events, the messaging was all about the 'ArcGIS Platform' - putting GIS strategically at the centre of the IM landscape. This seems to have been replaced by Digital Transformation (DT) - I guess platforms are somewhat old hat these days! In reality, the majority of the GIS world has been digital for some time, so I suppose it's reasonable for it to stake a claim to a piece of the action. DT was certainly a consistent thread throughout the show. The problem is, labelling something as being a DT enabler isn't enough. There were very few solid examples presented of what that actually translates to: either functionally or in terms of business value. I accept this is probably not an issue unique to the world of GIS!
More 'Portals' than an Astronomy convention
Nearly every presentation I went to related to some sort of spatial portal. I've nothing against portals - they're engaging, they help people find information and often have all sorts of widgets that are fun to play with. But we've been deploying GIS portals for over 15 years! Surely there's more to it these days?
Where's the clever stuff happening?
I was hoping for more examples about how data science, machine learning and analytics were impacting the GIS domain, in the way they seem to be elsewhere in the oil & gas world. The only talk that focused on this was Paul Cleverley's excellent paper on using machine learning to explore and unearth potential analogues. But to be fair, the map bit was not what this was about. A couple of other presentations alluded to the value extracted from analytics but were frustratingly light on detail. And I could have listened to a whole presentation from Equinor on how they challenged human-based basin classification with spatially derived insights.
There was also a show of hands in one session on how many people had deployed ESRI's 'Insights' analytics tool, launched about 3 years ago. Less around 5% of the audience responded in the positive. Do people not want GIS-centric business analysis tools? Or are they just bringing spatial analytics to play in other (non-ESRI) ways?
Has progress in GIS stalled?
The impression I came away with was that nothing much has changed over the past 5 years. For sure, the technology stack has become more sophisticated and the ability to scale and deploy faster is probably much improved. There a plethora of tools and apps available. And there's no doubt companies are extracting real value from GIS. But it felt to me that we are treading water. It might be mightily unfair to draw this conclusion based on a sampling from a vendor-specific user conference. Perhaps the real action around, say, spatial analytics, is happening elsewhere in the data science community, who tend to use open source tech and treat spatial data as just another source of information? Perhaps it's just getting harder to extract great examples of really exciting developments from increasingly cautious oil & gas companies, who find it easier to flash up anodyne portal pictures with no risk to IP? Or perhaps the downturn has hit innovation hard in the GIS space?
Perhaps I'll pop my head around the door again a few years' time to see if I was wrong.
I don't think this area is stalling at all, in fact I would argue that compared to other areas of information management or non-spatial data science "we" are in a fascinating and exciting time. Spatial analytics, mobile data collection, indoor tracking, remote sensing and automation. And helping drive location insights to meet the global energy challenge, not just oil and gas anymore. I agree that it is hard to show the truly interesting advancements in an open forum.
I completely agree with your summary Gareth. The ePUG is a fantastic forum to showcase GIS innovation in the Oil and Gas industry and in particular, networking with peers. It’s also really well organised and hosted by Thierry. That said, seeing more presentations on tools, workflows and GIS related ideas would be great. Portals are great but for me the analysis side to GIS, especially in exploration is what I’d really like to see. It would be interesting to see more exploration workflows done in GIS that are traditionally done in other software such as at area depth pairs. I also feel a lot of presentations are in the guise of a sales pitch and really aren’t that beneficial. With this in mind however the confidentiality and competitor advantage nature of the industry do inhibit companies from revealing the “sexy” stuff that really does help find hydrocarbons.
Hi Gareth – It was great to see you again at the ePUG last week, I’m glad that you could join us. Thanks for writing a short blog post with some stimulating thoughts, I’ve endeavored to respond to a couple of them below: I’m very pleased that you recognized the efforts of the ePUG Committee to execute a professional event, as you say kudos to the team. Although numbers were a little lower than we had hoped (178) we were extremely pleased by both the energy and quality of presentations. I’m afraid that I can’t agree with you comment re subdued atmosphere, as I mingled throughout the conference people seemed enthused to discuss both the technology and value that they are creating for their organizations. The Age of the Platform and Digital Transformation – Most organizations have by this time realized the significant value of spatial analysis/location analytics in some form to their business; you’d be hard pressed to find a utility, city, retail or O&G company that doesn’t believe it provides a fundamental underpinning to their strategic business performance, throughout the value chain. What we were referring to with ‘Digital Transformation’ is the significant IT/IS lead effort at present to re-consider the way in which organizations approach everyday workflow processes. Our point was that the ‘GIS Platform’ already provides many of the tools desired by the new ‘Corporate Data Scientist’ and we need to reach out to them – Complex data-types, Big Data Capabilities, Mobility, Analytics and AI/ML integration points with Python, R, Tensor Flow, etc for work with Real-Time SCADA and Imagery. We demonstrated all of these capabilities during the plenary, and picked up many questions in the follow-up workshop sessions and in private discussion. I agree of course that Paul Cleverley’s presentation was very good, and so too were many others – especially those of Shell on Digital Transformation, BP on developing a professional spatial discipline, Addax on moving to the cloud, OSRL on Oil Spill Contingency Planning, etc. All these will be published soon c/o of the ePUG proceedings we hope (permissions allowing). Portals – Remember the saying that we’ve both heard for 20+ yrs that many geologists spend >60% of their time looking for data and getting it into a form they can use? Well Portals have substantially taken care of that as you know, but people are quite rightly still proud of this accomplishment, in this regard I’d like to cite the excellent work and presentations of the OGA, NPD and BP – all of whom presented. As you note, it is sometimes hard to get people to present projects that they consider contain significant commercial advantage eg their new AI/ML code, but this isn’t a challenge peculiar to GIS or to O&G. The ePUG Committee did a fantastic job of encouraging excellent content, and participation from every major European Operator and achieved it – I believe that is to be commended and celebrated. As I believe the content of the ePUG showed - far from 'stalling out' spatial science is delivering 'real value'. Geoff Wade | Petroleum Community Outreach - Esri
Wonderful summary and it is amazing to me how many dejavú moments I continue to have at every GIS gathering. It is also frustrating to me that ESRIs licensing often is in a way of its own success. I think your comment that “There was also a show of hands in one session on how many people had deployed ESRI's 'Insights' analytics tool, launched about 3 years ago. Less around 5% of the audience responded in the positive. “ is exactly the product of a cumbersome deployment/licensing: I had a very complicated explanation of what esri software and license level I really need to be able to use “Insights”. I was referred to one “licensing expert” and had to track her down. Great to see you back in GIS arena Gareth!
We had an interesting workshop from a O&G GIS provider who we had been subscribed to for many years. Many in our G&G department were unaware of how rich the metadata was behind the layers. We were shown robust workflows of how to leverage this data using Microsoft's PowerBI which has a measure of AI involved. The question is how can the GIS industry make this automated for the user and how many ways can we visualise this data?