RECORDS, PRODUCT AND INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

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Contents

Introduction

Throughout history, all organizations regardless of their size, public or private, share one thing in common. They all receive and create information. Next to their employees, information has long been regarded as the most important asset or resource within an organization.

Today, more and more organizations are seeing the value and critical nature of this vital asset. Most successful organizations have developed and implemented comprehensive Records and Information Management (RIM) programs within their corporation and included it as part of their business operations framework.

The main purpose behind RIM programs is to ensure records and information assets are retained to meet all administrative and operational requirements of an organization. In addition, RIM programs ensure compliance to governing legislation.

A comprehensive RIM program addresses three (3) primary objectives:

  1. Provide quick and accurate access to products and information.
  2. Provide efficiencies to process and handle products and information.
  3. Provide economies to manage and store products and information.

Information represents knowledge and organizations utilize this knowledge on a daily basis in performing activities, solving problems and making critical decisions affecting business operations.

RIM can be defined as the systematic control and management of products and recorded information either created or received by an organization during the normal course of business. Products and recorded information come in a variety of mediums and carry various characteristics and attributes.

RIM programs provide control over the receipt, creation, maintenance, retention, storage, retrieval, preservation (including information migration) and final disposition of all recorded information.

The PPDM Electronic Information And Product Management Module supports management of many different types of material including:

  1. Traditional media, such as paper documents, maps and files.
  2. Electronic media, such as tapes and CD-ROM.
  3. Physical products, such as drilling cuttings, lithologic samples and fossils.
  4. Equipment, such as hand-held computing devices, microscopes or vehicles.

Business Process Overview

Purpose

The Information And Product Management Module provides a means of describing and managing information about information and products. Information and products are created throughout the life cycle of a project, from acquisition through disposition. Typically, information products with long term value are considered to be a corporate asset and are treated as such using appropriate Records Management techniques.

Every day, every (productive) employee of every company creates and uses products or information. Managing these assets in an age where creating information is easier than ever has become extremely important. Each day, you must discern between useful assets and dross, properly identify the rights you have to incoming products and information (so you don’t claim what you don’t own) and understand and plan for the uses that each product or piece of information might be put to.

This is not a simple undertaking; anyone who is considering working in this domain should obtain properly trained experts. Internationally, the ARMA Association provides expertise, certification and education in this area. The business issues described in this section have been articulated by Industry; through their incorporation into the design of PPDM 3.7, the PPDM Association has ensured that the PPDM model supports Industry requirements for an effective and complete Information And Product Management Module.

Clarifying Some Terms

Knowledge, Information and Data

Much media attention has been focused on the concepts of knowledge, information and data. “Knowledge Management” has become a buzzword used by Service and Software providers to describe their services. Any dictionary can provide you with definitions for each of these terms – you can find some good ones here (www.merriam-webster.com).

Unfortunately, finding a meaningful way to apply these terms to your every day business practices is not as simple as looking up a definition. These three concepts can be described as a continuum in which the distinction between each category is blurred. Let’s use part of the life cycle of seismic as an illustration of this problem.

When seismic sets are first acquired through field acquisition, raw trace data is gathered. This, presumably, is data. However, the acquisition manager reviews the traces to determine the effectiveness of the recording programme; if necessary modifications are made to improve the data quality. For this function the raw traces are information that produces knowledge that helps the acquisition manager do his job better.

During processing, the raw traces are treated as data by the processor; the output from each step is information that guides the implementation of additional processing steps, yet the output of each step is data input to the next. Final processing products are used as input data into an interpretation package from which picks are made. Are the picks data, information or knowledge? We could go on endlessly, but the point is that each product is treated as data, information or knowledge by a user based on how they use it.

The terms data, information and knowledge are process driven terms; they are not product driven terms. What is most important to each manager is whether that product adds value to the organization; this determines how it should be managed.

Structured and Unstructured Data

Data storage and management has traditionally focused on structured formats such as databases. These formats are designed to support query and retrieval; as a result, use of databases as the underlying data store for software applications is commonplace. Unfortunately, structured data is in the minority in many businesses today. This is particularly true in the Energy Industry.

Today’s technology has enabled industry to generate unprecedented numbers of documents that are created as electronic files. Often, these documents contain analysis, recommendations, evaluations and findings that capture the knowledge asset of a corporation. Unfortunately, most of these documents exist in unstructured forms, such as spreadsheets, Word processing formats or text files; this data is generally referred to as unstructured data.

Finding information in these documents can be imprecise, time consuming and difficult. Nevertheless, it is important to manage these products, as they contain substantial portions of a corporation’s knowledge asset. New knowledge based search engines are being developed that will help users organize, collate and search these unstructured products for relevant information. You can learn more about search engines here (www.searchenginewatch.com).

Key Business Processes

Acquisition

Virtually every aspect of the Energy business is highly data and information intensive; vast amounts of information are created or retrieved at each phase of the life cycle of a well, lease or seismic set. Often business success depends on corporate ability to quickly and accurately retrieve information when it is needed. The late 1990’s and early 2000’s have been labeled “the Information Age”. All too often, however, the reality is simply Information Proliferation.

In PPDM, it is important to ensure that each piece of data or information and each product are associated with the business objects that they are related to. Each well file or core sample should be connected to the well it belongs to, each contract to all the wells, seismic or partnerships it affects and so on. In today’s energy business, records and information that are disassociated from the business objects that own them provide limited value to the organization and present a threat to true integration and growth.

Any product that may be required for legal purposes must be associated with a chain of custody so that you can prove its provenance. In some cases, it is necessary to provide and manage a certified true copy of a critical document. In each case, appropriate management must be enforced to ensure that these products are protected and legally admissible when they are needed.

Information Vs Rendering

The fundamental difference between the information that describes and identifies an item and the way that it has been rendered is one of the most critical concepts in effective information and product management today. This difference drives many corporate policies; properly managed it can enhance your ability to manage a RIM store effectively, but problems can make your system error prone and difficult to use.

Let’s use a seismic section as an example. Processed seismic trace data is created in a technical processing application and output in a variety of formats. Electronic copies may be stored on tape, CD ROM or disk. Physical copies may be output to film, fiche, microfilm or paper. Regardless of how the output has been rendered, the essential information content is identical. Knowledge about which physical renderings are simply copies of the same information is essential to effective RIM practices.

The PPDM data model accommodates this partitioning of concepts to support good management practices. Detail that describes a product, regardless of the media on which it is stored, is stored as an Information Item. Details about the various physical manifestations or renderings of that information are stored as Physical Items.

Each Information Item is associated with all the business objects in PPDM that are relevant to it; details about the business object are stored in the business module for that object, and are not replicated in the RM module. Only details about the information that specifically describe the information from a management perspective are stored in the RM module. This prevents needless replication of data and greatly reduces the risk of data input errors during the cataloguing process. Processes can be established that allow domain experts to manage and maintain this information.

The managers of an archive manage physical renderings; the archive may be digital or physical. It is the physical renderings of a product that are circulated, copied, maintained and managed through the life cycle.

Electronic Information Management

As our use of computers for data gathering and analysis increases, the timeliness and accessibility of the products or data we may be looking for has become increasingly important. Paper or film products are often time consuming and expensive to handle, so many organizations are adopting policies to obtain or create digital copies of as much data and information as possible. Scanning, optical character recognition (OCR) and other imaging technologies have become widespread.

Distributed computing environments have created their own set of benefits and risks. Analysts can generate thousands of documents, spreadsheets and interpretations each year; of these, some contain useful information that should be considered a corporate asset. Most of these products, however, are simply working documents, drafts and temporary files. The first problem facing the RIM specialist is to determine which product is an asset and which is not and should be discarded; the second is to gather and protect data that has value.

Digital File Storage

Relational databases provide users with capability to store large objects directly in the database. PPDM 3.6 takes advantage of this capability by allowing electronic files to be stored in the RM module. This means that electronic documents, such as MS Word files or spreadsheets and images, can be stored in your PPDM 3.6 database.

Tremendous benefits can be realized through this strategy. For example, documents stored in an Oracle database are not subject to problems with changing file names or directory structures; this is a problem that plagues data storage, most file servers or local disk drives (such as the user’s “C” drive).

Security controls for accessibility and entitlements can be administered using your database; this functionality is generally far superior to the security on a file server. The PPDM Entitlements module can be used to enhance security control by tracking exactly who is entitled to read, copy, change or delete these electronic records.

Product Management

The PPDM model keeps track of all products and their various renderings. In addition, it tracks maintenance schedules and records, retention schedules, duplication and tape copy records. PPDM 3.6 will allow you to keep track of every product you ever generate, but this is unlikely to support the needs of a user community. Records management policies, procedures and practices must take into account which renderings or copies should be kept. Strategies for dealing with version control, old media destruction and sign-out of original media must support the long and short-term needs of an organization.

Tape copy processes are not an exact science; parity errors or other problems with original media can create copies that are not exact replicas of their parents. In some cases, errors can be corrected but sometimes the error is permanent. In these cases, the RM module allows you to track the errors encountered and what you did to attempt repairs.

Lithologic (rock) samples, core cuttings, drilling mud samples and other physical products are part of an effective product management strategy. As with information, these products must be associated with the business objects that own them; without this integration you may have nothing more than a bucket of rock or mud. Furthermore, each product must be associated with any relevant technical analysis that was conducted; this provides important information for replicating and enhancing the results of scientific analysis.

Equipment management is rapidly gaining importance; not only must you know where each piece of equipment is and who is using it, but you must know which piece of equipment was used to gather which data. Calibration information for technical instruments can provide critical insights into data gathered with them, and details about the conditions under which each instrument was used can affect data analysis.

Encoding and Encryption

Nearly all the electronic data that is a long-term asset is encoded in some way. Records management specialists need to consider how encoding will affect their policies and practices. For example, if documents are stored in MS Word format, you must consider which version of MS Word is used and whether an appropriate viewer / editor will be available for that format at the end of the document’s life span. Open viewers for formats based on open technology are generally preferred over electronic files that are stored in proprietary formats; remember, for example, that documents created in early versions of MS Word cannot be viewed in current versions of MS Word.

Some products have been technically encoded in many ways. Seismic trace data may be encoded in RODE format and then tarred. A text document may use ASCII characters – but which character set is used? In order to properly identify the encoding applied to data, you must consider how the data was encoded, the order in which each layer was applied and you must have a method of decoding each layer. The PPDM module can be used to track all of this information.

Circulation and Distribution

Setting up a good mechanism for receiving, cataloguing and storing all of your products and information is only half the battle. Ultimately, each product must be made available to users; this is, after all, the reason why records management exists. Think about what could happen if you give the only copy of a critical document to a user who loses or damages it. What is the liability or cost to the corporation?

Balancing the needs of the user against corporate requirements may require some delicate maneuvering, but it can be done. Most organizations provide copies to their users when they are needed and ensure that the original (or certified true copy) is retained in a protected environment. Others ensure that only properly authorized and trained personnel handle the product. Either way, you need to know who has each product, when they got it and when it is expected back again.

The condition of certain products is important; this can serve as a trigger to maintenance or copying processes and can provide important insight into the effectiveness of your practices.

Version control is also critical; when a product is checked back into the archive, is it exactly the same as when it arrived, or has it been modified? Facility drawings, for example, are often redlined when they are taken into the field. Documents may be edited before they are returned to an electronic archive. PPDM 3.6 allows you to keep track of this important information in support of your policies and practices.

Transactions, Agreements and Partnerships

Mergers, buy-outs, acquisition, farmin agreements and partnerships are commonplace today. Each has a similar consequence for the product and information manager; products and information are going to be moved around, copied or distributed. Naturally, the better your database, the simpler these processes will be.

PPDM version 3.6 allows users to keep track of the transactions that they have been party to; each transaction can be associated with the physical items that were affected by it. Each partnership can be associated with the business objects and the physical items that are relevant to it. Contracts can be associated in the same way.


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