Cures for Corporate Amnesia in the Oil Industry

Writing in the July 2006 issue of Practicing Oil Analysis magazine, Jason Kopschinshy, Noria Corporation, offers the oil and gas industry some suggestions for handling the “corporate amnesia”--the crunch of heuristics (discovery achieved by trial and error) gone missing--that companies will eventually feel as baby boomers retire. The industry may be one of the hardest hit, as the Oil and Gas Journal suggests that, by the year 2010, as many as 60% of experienced managers will retire from the industry.

For those seeking to ensure that production equipment is as streamlined and effective as possible, Kopschinshy suggests that procedure-based maintenance should become "a strategic and tangible method of collecting data on current maintenance, production and operating methods, analyzing the information and improving on it through technology, heuristics and proven techniques, then documenting the information in a user database." If knowledge management is not made a priority: "If we do not periodically update maintenance procedures to reflect changes in technology - machine configuration, equipment age, and changes in economic penalty of failure or machine criticality - they too will become useless over time."

Source: Practing Oil Analysis "The Real Cost of Corporate Amnesia" (July 2006)

Related articles: "Oil and Gas Industry Being Hit by Aging Workforce"; "Oil and Gas Industry: Seeking Solutions to Aging Workforce"