Overview

Client: One of the world’s largest independent oil and gas companies

Sector: Energy

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Our Client

Our client is one of the world’s largest independent oil and gas companies employing over 1500 people worldwide with production bases in Europe and Asia.

Challenge

As a result of several significant business acquisitions in recent years, our client had inherited an information estate containing a mix of live and outdated information totalling over 320TB and in excess of 25 million files.

The business acquisitions and poor data management contributed to a high degree of duplication, inconsistent naming and structure, data overlap, data dispersal, a lack of control and significant reduction in the ability to locate the right data in a timely manner. This led to ambiguity, confusion and many inconsistencies. Staff found it difficult to locate the most up to date information often caused by uncontrolled migrations and lack of overall data governance.

No estate level search functionality, common file structure or convention combined with a lack of detailed legacy knowledge further reduced the ability to locate valuable information. Our integrated approach to information management was required to resolve these challenging issues.

Solution

We worked collaboratively with the client’s Information Systems (IS) teams and business functions on a multiphase project utilising our proven methodologies, capabilities and tools to deliver:

• High level estate analysis and mapping
• A detailed functional classification and analysis to :
  • Identify direct and hot spot duplication
  • Identify PII that should be removed from the estate due to GDPR regulations
  • Identify ROT information for removal
  • Identify areas of potential material for archiving
  • Identify company critical records, prioritising regulatory records
  • Create a set of actionable recommendations to consolidate and migrate remaining data for functional owner approval
• Data visualisations demonstrating the extent of how the information is disseminated
• A set of activity roadmaps taking into account business priorities so as not to hinder key business activities

Result

working with the client, our integrated approach to information management has delivered:

• Over 4.8 million duplicate, ROT, archive and PII files were removed form the information estate significantly reducing the time to locate and find the right information
• Data consolidated from the multiple drives, decommissioning redundant drives, reducing infrastructure overheads, reducing ambiguity and increasing the ease with which staff can access data and information
• Company critical records migrated to SharePoint and stored appropriately to ensure internal and external compliance is supported