Data drives organisation processes – moving through structured and unstructured formats, providing key information for effective process management and enabling valuable business insights to management for improved decision making and business innovation.
Most organisations today have set formats to recognise, capture and use structured data – aided through policies, operating manuals and process documentation. However they do not have adequate systems to meaningfully capture, analyse and interpret unstructured data that get generated across other digital formats such as file images, individual notes, e-mails, scanned images and voice recordings. Studies reveal that these unstructured data, when effectively “structured for reuse”, can generate significant understanding on areas with potential for risk mitigation, cost reduction and enhanced customer engagement – all of which are extremely pertinent to driving results in today’s challenging economy.
Chevron’s Key Documents and Collaboration Solution (KDACS) initiative is a notable instance on how organisations can leverage unstructured data to drive business performance. Chevron’s global presence necessitates a unified system to manage complex projects, plan assets and optimize oil production. To effectively plan the initiative, the KDACS design team determined how users managed processes and interacted within a structured data environment. Then, they imagined how they would deliver when they had access to unstructured data. This helped clarify the workflows, nature of unstructured documents that existed in the system, and then define how these documents will need to be tagged, who will tag them and where these would be stored.
Piloted across three Chevron locations – West Texas, Gulf of Thailand and Western Australia, the KDACS helped in creating effective data search capabilities, uniform workflows, value added data and universally accessible shared repositories. KDACS has presently helped Chevron derive significant benefits including cost avoidance, process and logistical efficiencies, and improved decision quality.
