The Petroleum industry is spending more money than ever before to make information complete, correct, current, reachable and usable. This is, as anyone who has tried it knows only too well, not a trivial undertaking. In a typical Oil and Gas company, information is stored in digital silos that are not easily integrated and correlated. Financial information and electronic documents are not stored in the same systems as other business and technical information.

Users rarely care where and how information is managed. But they do care about problems such as data errors, inconsistencies, duplication or incomplete data. We need to constantly improve our policies, practices and procedures to ensure that our user's needs are being met. Business rules are emerging as powerful tools that can help your company create and manage high quality data and information.

Often, there are tens of systems holding critical decision analysis information hostage. Sometimes the same kind of information is stored in more than one system; all too often they are incomplete or even contradictory! Our job as data managers is to ferret these systems out, figure out what kinds of information exist, determine where it's being stored, and decide how to make it available to a user community in a meaningful, easy to understand way.

Standards set the stage to make these processes easier and more effective by enabling consistent, integrated, high quality business practices within our industry. This discussion will examine some of the issues related to developing policies, practices and procedures in an Oil and Gas company. We'll talk about the importance of business rules, semantics and good communication. Based on PPDM member feedback, we'll lay out some standards based recommendations for data management best practices that will help prepare your company to succeed and set the stage for the future.