IT and Strategy, not oil and water any more

JAIPUR, INDIA: Not swayed by what's in fashion and not mired in conventional complacence - that's what quintessentially captures the genre of wisdom that Sudhir Mittal, GM IT, Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation (GSPC) brings around.

Over a deep métier of years spent in drilling sense (common and well as business one) out of IT hyperboles, Mittal is a well-anchored veteran who clearly means it when he nails the message that ‘IT should deliver on the ground and not as a pipe dream'.

How has the last year seen your IT strategy evolving? Any special interventions?

GSPC is a energy and utility company based at Gujarat - have mostly ways and emerging technologies to transform the way they function So far. We were operating in a traditional environment by adopting standard technology practices. Now, GSPC is switching to innovative IT to reduce costs, drive operational efficiencies, Regulations and Compliance and most importantly to enhance customer services. Also, we adopted open source based solutions to address our business KPI's.

At present, our focused is supporting business growth by implementing VHF communication for Aero / Marine operation specific to exploration of Gas fields in KG basin and Oil fields, SAP role-outs to stream line business processes, ways and emerging technologies to transform the way they function, real-time tracking of well heads production from head office, enhancement of security and access control by implementing advanced Surveillance system to increase operational efficiency, regulations and compliance, reduction of overall project time lines and improved decision making.

Any action to leverage Big Data analytics to predict Outages and unwanted incidents like the industry has seen in recent past?

We are planning to leveraging Big Data analytics for predicting the future failure patterns of critical equipment. By understanding future circumstances, organizations can better align their resources for operational efficiency to drive sustained business growth and improved customer service.

For instance, we are increasingly interested in big data implementation of tracking or stuff like predictive maintenance. Right now, the approach, to a large extent, is reactive which the industry can change specially when it comes to predicting failures and dependency on criticality of equipment. Ours is a planned project and we are taking it off soon. This should hopefully create ripples in respective functions and help them with new things like alerts for necessary action. Data is a continuous stream in this industry so using it in a predictive flavor in a way that mitigates downtime and unwanted incidents, can help a lot.

So the coming year will get your attention in areas like?

We would be focusing on well-head supply chain, predictive maintenance, online monitoring of critical equipment, GPS-based technologies, remote leakage tracking in pipes or oil transmission phases for theft and accident control, automated accountability etc. Pipe tracking project is being tested with POCs in remote locations in some states.