Upstream data strategy — the six-month blueprint

The question the client actually asked

A key National Oil Company in the Middle East, active in oil and gas upstream, engaged us to set the foundation for a large-scale digital transformation. Within the first weeks the leadership team reached the conclusion that shapes every serious upstream digital programme: no meaningful transformation was possible without a clear Data Strategy, disciplined Master Data Management, and a Corporate Information Factory the business could actually rely on. The rest of the programme depended on it.

What six months delivered

In a compressed six-month timeline we defined Master Data Management across every business unit — exploration, drilling, production, HSE, finance and shared services — with owners, stewards and a governance model designed to survive rotation of people. In parallel, we built a working pilot of the Corporate Information Factory: not a slide, a running platform ingesting real production data and demonstrating the target logical and physical model end-to-end.

“No digital transformation was possible without a clear Data Strategy. The rest of the programme depended on it.”

The 18-month implementation plan

Alongside the blueprint we designed the 18-month implementation roadmap: a full revamp of the entire set of data structures and solutions from both a logical and a physical perspective, sequenced by business value and by data readiness. The plan named which data domains would move first, which platforms would be retired, which would be re-platformed, and where new capability had to be built rather than bought.

What we learned

Upstream data problems are never purely technical. The hardest work in the six months was aligning subsurface, wells and production functions on shared definitions — a well, a completion, a barrel produced — that they had historically defined differently for good operational reasons. Getting that alignment before touching a platform is what makes the implementation deliverable.