From The Industrial Age to the Digital Era

It’s rare to hear directly from a business leader who has a broad range of oil and gas experience, coupled with a personal front-line role in leading digital adoption, but this podcast offers just that.

Lewis Gillhespy is a former senior leader with Suncor, including roles as Global Chief Geologist, major asset developer, head of a major acquisition, R&D, and lastly, digital transformation leader for the subsurface areas.

He describes how oil and gas companies are the children of the Industrial Age. They are reflective of the massive scale of operations that grew out of the enormous social demands for energy. Their breadth and range of operations, international reach, technology diversity, and emphasis on innovation has created very complex organizations with customized ways of working that are in turn dependent on skilled managers with personal relationship skills to navigate. This business model has rendered them hugely profitable, but highly vulnerable to the digital revolution.

Lewis highlights how the adoption of lean methods of working, that simplify complex processes that in turn allow managers to control data and technologies and systems, create more nimble companies that can quickly embrace change. The reason is that processes tend to be more stable than IT, data or people. Tackling just the data or IT means you miss the process opportunity.

The business pressure is that the case for digital is an exponential one, and is now outracing the industrial model. This exponential business case is predicated on high quality data.

1. Driving down cost, driving out waste to achieve low cost operatorship;

2. Producing compelling metrics, delivering analytics from data, applying AI on data, and deriving insights such as benchmarking; and,

3. Innovating new ways of working that deliver dramatic productivity gains.

This forces a need for leadership to be actively engaged in the transformation, as uncomfortable as that may be, to promote the new ways of work, and model the right behaviours.

These days, Lewis works as a consultant in Geoscience, Digital Transformation, Project Management, and Commercial M&A to the Energy Industry. He holds an MSc in Petroleum Geoscience from Imperial College, a BSc. in Geological Science from Leeds University and attended the Harvard Business School Leadership Program in Boston.