A senior Woodside Petroleum executive has urged Perth companies to be less secretive, saying recent deals it struck with local businesses had occurred only after learning of their world-class expertise by chance.
A senior Woodside Petroleum executive has urged Perth companies to be less secretive, saying recent deals it struck with local businesses had occurred only after learning of their world-class expertise by chance.
Woodside senior vice-president of strategy, science and technology, Shaun Gregory, told a Networking WA event in Perth today the company had begun working with local data and analytics companies Optika Solutions and was considering TSG Consulting, but could easily have missed the opportunity.
“There are companies in Perth that are world class and we don’t know them,” Mr Gregory said.
“One thing I think Perth needs to do a whole lot better job of is telling stories about what’s working.
“We’ve come across people and companies that were complete unknown to us and yet clearly would have been top two, three in the world in their field, and we stumbled upon them.
“Lucky, but it would have been a whole lot cheaper and better for everyone involved if we weren’t stumbling, (if) we knew that ecosystem well.”
Mr Gregory said companies needed to protect their core IP but should share everything else that wasn’t commercial in confidence.
“No-one shares what they’re doing and people are scared of technology and innovation and intellectual property,” he said.
“One of the first big changes we made was being very clear about your core secrets. The intellectual property you’re not going to talk about, and then everything else you should and then share and talk (about) and everyone else will hopefully accelerate that innovation.
“There needs to be more forums that do that.”
The major oil and gas company, which has an artificial intelligence unit, has been dramatically ramping up its digital and innovation capabilities.
“Four months ago we had nothing in analytics, today our analytics platform is larger than Twitter,” Mr Gregory said.
In other technological developments Mr Gregory revealed developing algorithms had allowed Woodside to improve predictions of when systems required maintenance or were likely to fail, allowing it to save costs on planning and upkeep.
He said predictions using data analytics that used to be 50 per cent accurate and could only be made up to one day in advance had improved to become in some cases 85 per cent accurate and predictable up to months out from the event.
“(We’ve) been stunned by the scale and speed of deployment and how fast the technology has come,” Mr Gregory said.
He said improving its data analytics substantially had not come at a high cost, because while Woodside was prepared to take creative risks, its focus on developing prototypes on a small and fast scale kept failures within an acceptable budget.
