Social networking tools not used to full potential – Microsoft and Accenture survey
Feature Articles, May  29  2009 (Digital Energy Journal)

- Social networking tools are not being used anywhere near their full potential in the upstream oil and gas industry said respondents to a recent Microsoft and Accenture survey

Microsoft and Accenture commissioned research earlier this year asking oil and gas professionals how much they think that social networking tools can help them in their work – and whether they think their companies are taking as much advantage of them as they should be.

40 per cent of respondents said they viewed new social media tools as useful to boost collaboration and productivity on the job. However only 25 per cent of respondents said that social media tools are currently available in their companies.

The survey, conducted in January 2009 on behalf of Microsoft and Accenture by Penn Energy, questioned 272 geoscientists, engineers, mid-level and executive management and project managers, based in North America (43.4%), Asia Pacific (28.1%), Middle East (21.7%), South America (21.3%), Europe (16.9%) and Africa (14.6%).

When asked which of the various social networking tools would be useful, 60 per cent agreed video or photo sharing could be useful; 57.3 per cent said social networking sites; 46.8 per cent said wikis; 41.8 per cent said podcasts; and 41.4 per cent said blogging.

50 per cent said they believe these tools could help them find scarce resources; 74 per cent of respondents felt that these technologies could be used to advance the tools of project management.

Craig Hodges, energy and chemicals industry solutions director, Microsoft.

“We were testing to see if these technologies were just used to talk to your friends – or if these technologies could be used to advance the business,” says Craig Hodges, energy and chemicals industry solutions director, Microsoft.

Great possibilities

Of course there is very little which is specifically new in social networking tools – people have been able to pass photographs around, look each other up in a directory, communicate with each other, work on documents together, make newsletters and leave voicemails for many years.

But perhaps social networking is better viewed as a culture – rather than a set of tools – and younger workers entering the industry are much more comfortable with this culture than their older colleagues – and expect to have it around them.

“If you think about a typical 20 year old – they search for all kinds of data, they have people they know, they do instant messaging, they have text messaging, they have so many technologies at their fingertips – my daughter has all of these technologies,” says Mr Hodges.

Mr Hodges tells a story which an oil company CIO told him, about his experience dropping his daughter off at college for the first time, and watching her give her new roommate, who she had never physically met before, a big hug.

For the past few months, his daughter had been talking to her new roommate using social networking tools, and they seemed to have got to know each other very well already.

The oil company CIO started wondering – what could we do if we had social networking tools in our company? The oil and gas business, after all, often needs people who have just met to work closely together – what if they could use the full range of social networking tools to get to know each other beforehand?

Challenges of management

According to the results of the survey, “most people believe the [biggest] inhibitor to taking on more of these technologies is management,” said Mr Hodges.

“That’s not surprising at all,” he says.

“A lot of these respondents felt their company cultures were not aligned to accepting these kinds of technologies.”

Social networking certainly posts a big challenge to companies – who normally have to post strong restrictions on how much employees can reveal to the public about what they are doing, to comply with stock exchange rules and ensure that the company does not reveal too many secrets. This applies to talking to journalists as much to posting on public websites.

But maybe the question is more – how do you integrate social networking into your company – not whether to have it – because employees will probably use social networking tools whether management likes it or not.

People immersed in a social networking culture will be able to quickly understand the contribution it could make to any group activity – and are unlikely to accept being told that they can’t do it.

CBrian Miller, senior executive with Accenture’s Energy industry group

“There will be a grassroots movement towards these collaborative technologies,” says Brian Miller, senior executive with Accenture’s Energy industry group. The question is “how do they leverage the technologies and integrate it into the culture.”

Mr Miller believes that companies will gradually create governance systems as to how these technologies should be used – in the same way that they have with document management systems, such as Microsoft SharePoint Server.

Social networking does not necessarily need to be public. For example, Microsoft has developed a tool called MySite, which is like a Facebook but behind a company’s firewall – so only people within the company can access other people’s information.

Accenture sees itself as a specialist in helping companies make cultural change, Mr Miller says, and so it is eager to help companies adapt to new ways of working.

Structured and unstructured

Some processes in oil and gas companies are very structured – for example, procurement – and it would probably be a mistake to think that social networking tools can be helpful in structured processes.

It is better to have dedicated workflow software tools which take users in specific roles from screen to screen, the complete specific tasks and create the right documentation in the right format with all the necessary fields completed.

But plenty of people’s work is unstructured. “People in their day to day jobs work part of the time in structured worlds and part of the time in unstructured worlds,” says Mr Hodges.

“The social networking is targeted around that unstructured work process,” he says.

Unstructured work is often what management spend most of their attention on. “Management generally works by exception – if the process works right they won’t get involved,” he says.

Finding people

One of the most important contributions which social networking tools can make is helping to find people with certain expertise in the company.

For example, if you want to find someone who worked on a specific asset team, or on a particular problem 2 years ago, it can be very hard to do using the official company directory, says Mr Hodges. You have to rely on people’s memory and how good terms you are with experienced employees.

But if everyone has a profile on the company social network listing all the projects they have been in, and all the groups they have been part of, it can be much easier to trace the right people.

Accenture uses similar tools internally, and all staff are expected to maintain a profile on it, so other people can find them. “We are required to update our skills, update our profile, update our resume on a frequent basis,” says Accenture’s Mr Miller.

When looking for a person in the company with specific expertise, “I can go on that site, enter some criteria, such as expertise on specific technologies – and get a list of everybody that could maybe help me.”

“It used to take a couple of days, if not longer, to try to find someone that can help out. Now it can be done in a matter of minutes.”

Accenture is already using Facebook as part of its college recruiting, so people can start talking with and find out more about the recruiters before they meet.

“There’s more of a push from them to know who you are,” says Mr Miller. “They want to know the whole 9 yards.”

Microsoft

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