The migration of enterprise workflows to digital has been taking place since the 1980s with the advent of the personal computer. The first wave of digital migration involved the digitalization of documents and telecommunication. A second wave took place a decade later when more media were digitalized and archived in centralized databases. Internet and mobile communication improved the speed of the process, and today practically every modern company process is digital and telematic in some aspect.
We are now facing a third wave of more advanced digital migration of workflows.
This is the case in a service design project Golder MediaLab undertook at the request of an oil and gas company in Europe. The client sought to leverage today’s digital transformation approach to streamline the management of remediation activities on a portfolio of hundreds of sites.
A digital
transformation
process is not just a
matter of technology;
it involves internal
procedures, people skills,
cost awareness and the
ability to support
long-term
opportunities.
The Project Challenges
The company had a complex and onerous workflow to manage sites undergoing regulated remediation procedures. A lot of time was invested to understand, report and update on the progress of remediation across this portfolio of sites.
Executive stakeholders participated in quarterly meetings spanning days to track monthly site activities, the risk level for the company, and mitigation actions. It was a cumbersome and repetitive process with an ever-changing number of sites being evaluated. When some remediation sites were closed, new ones entered in the chain. Information was collected in spreadsheets, so the client struggled to produce a clear status report and derive portfolio-wide metrics, which impeded the client’s ability to assess and improve processes over time.
A Collaborative Approach
Modernizing the company’s workflows could not be done by an external consultant alone; It had to be a joint effort. The client knew the activities to be managed and Golder’s MediaLab team brought a future-ready perspective as well as the expertise to automate routine data collection, update workflows to distribute the effort, and centralize the data. This would allow the client easy access to the necessary metrics for analysis of the entire program.
Using an Agile approach, which allowed for frequent reassessment and adaptation, Golder’s team organized stakeholder groups to define user requirements, benchmark the current status of site activities, and design a digital transformation process to improve overall program management.
A Smart Solution
Golder’s MediaLab supported the client with developing a new way to perform a complex task, advancing from a series of decentralized custom-made spreadsheets to a modern web-based solution.
The multi-user software features a visual dashboard that provides an overview of all site activities, highlighting key issues and deadlines to be met. The system also provides aggregated analytics across the portfolio, enabling the client to understand where they can improve internal protocols and identify possible external threats.
Each location has a dedicated section that allows users to drill-down into remediation activities. Each activity is managed directly by the person responsible for it, thus distributing the monitoring and updating effort, and relieving the executive team of the time-consuming quarterly task.
The design of the software took place in a series of meetings using prototyping tools to create interactive mock-ups that fully demonstrated the system features. Critical feedback was collected from stakeholders during the prototyping process to verify that the final design accommodated the needs of all users.
The final working user interface provides a clear picture of how workflows will improve and a precise estimate of the budget to implement the system.
Achieving Digital Transformation
A digital transformation process is not just a matter of technology; it involves internal procedures, people skills, cost awareness and the ability to support long-term opportunities. Golder MediaLab considered these factors when providing this transformative digital solution to the client.
