Data Catalogues Move from Theory into Practice

Finding data of known quality, regardless of source is a key industry requirement but data exists in different formats, with different standards applied, stored on different systems, provided by a variety of vendors.Accessing data often requires skilled knowledge of a specific application or database and once the data has been retrieved, merged, analysed or evaluated, how the output information or knowledge is shared is often a barrier. This is especially true if the information is required by people external to the team who created it as they may use a different set of applications and have their own data standards, terminology and work practices. Issues of data availability, access and quality have caused problems across the industry for many years. This has resulted in additional business costs, loss of value and inefficient working practices. There have been many different initiatives that have attempted to address these data integration and access issues with varying degrees of success. With Internet technologies maturing, portals are now being exploited to provide integrated data access across organisational boundaries. Although portals offer significant potential as data access and sharing mechanisms, they do not address the issues of data quality, data standards, differences in business terminology, business processes, organisational roles and organisational culture that must all be addressed if real business benefit is to be realised from investment in collaborative data management. For many years the relationships between people, process and technology has influenced the way that new software has been developed and deployed. This relationship model does not address the key component of data. People, process, technology and data is more representative of the E&P business and catalogues can be deployed to exploit these relationships. Catalogues, within the E&P industry, are still at an immature stage but Logica has been actively involved in implementing these catalogues as business solutions. This experience leads us to concur that catalogues can provide a step change in industry KID (knowledge, information, data) integration which provides business benefit through improved efficiencies, reduction in costly errors and value addition through collaborative working and knowledge sharing.