Marathon Oil Corporation found itself managing a mountain of information that was difficult to search and expensive to maintain. So the company created an enterprise content management team and implemented a solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 that employees can use to find and share information and expertise. Marathon has slowed the rate of information growth and can now better meet operational, legal, and regulatory requirements.
Business Needs
Oil and gas producers face multiple challenges today: more restricted access to oil and gas resources, significant price volatility, a changing work force, increased regulations, and heightened concern about climate change. To better compete in this tough environment, Marathon Oil Corporation, an integrated energy company based in Houston, Texas, sought to drive costs and inefficiencies out of its business by better managing one of its most important assets—information.
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[Our enterprise content management solution] helps us find the information that we need to do our jobs or, if it doesn’t exist, helps us find the people who know. |
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Reid Smith
Enterprise Content Management Director, Marathon Oil Corporation |
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Marathon is the fourth-largest integrated oil company based in the United States, according to Petroleum Intelligence Weekly. In running its global business, Marathon estimated that it had accumulated nearly 400 terabytes of data; left unchecked, the mountain of information was expected to double every 18 months. This information was stored in e mail inboxes and folders, Web sites and Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 sites, file shares, individual PCs, removable media, and other electronic and physical storage repositories.
Marathon executives recognized the need for increased focus on consistent records management practices so that out-of-date information could be purged with assurance that legal and regulatory requirements were honored.
Marathon also saw opportunities to improve employee productivity and effectiveness. “Employees spent a good deal of time searching for, validating, or re-creating information to ensure that their decisions were based on the best information,” says Reid Smith, Enterprise Content Management Director for Marathon Oil Corporation. “One senior manager told me, ‘I want half the time of my engineers back.’”
Solution
These challenges motivated Marathon to launch an enterprise content management (ECM) program in early 2007. Information management professionals within Marathon worked with Houston-based Gimmal Group, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner that specializes in ECM and records management solutions using Microsoft technologies. “We consulted with many other companies in the energy industry and beyond and found that Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 was the common denominator of their ECM systems,” Smith says.
The Marathon team focused on building an ECM policy framework, defining information management governance roles, simplifying and standardizing the company’s classification and records retention process, and implementing the technology infrastructure. Gimmal provided strategic content management guidance, ECM design, and development assistance.
In 2009, Marathon introduced MaraView™, its ECM solution for creating, finding, and sharing relevant, up-to-date, and trusted information. MaraView has three tiers:
- MaraView front page serves as the corporate intranet home page and provides employees with a consistent, companywide communication channel, displaying company and industry news, key business indicators, and links to enterprise information sources. Information is filtered and presented based on logon credentials to meet the needs of employees and contractors.
- TeamView sites provide company teams with publishing sites or private online collaboration sites to upload, store, share, and refine project data, schedules, procedures, and so forth. Project teams building a refinery or laying a pipeline, or Communities of Practice developing knowledge assets, use TeamView sites where members collaborate in a single shared place. As of January 2010, Marathon had implemented approximately 250 TeamView sites, a number expected to grow substantially over the next few years.
- MyView sites present information that is customized for each individual. Employees can personalize their MyView sites to their liking. While MaraView, TeamView, and MyView sites all connect people to information, MyView sites also connect people to people. These sites contain profile information and serve as the company’s skills and expertise inventory. If a team is looking for engineers with deep-water drilling experience, it can search MyView sites to quickly find those individuals.
Benefits
With its enterprise content management solution, Marathon has slowed the rate of growth of the information mountain. While still a work in progress—enterprise adoption is expected to continue through 2011—thus far, Marathon has achieved:
- Faster location of information. Marathon now has a central repository of information from which employees can make sound decisions. “MaraView helps us find the information that we need to do our jobs or, if it doesn’t exist, helps us find the people who know,” says Smith. “Also, shining a light on our information stores reveals if we have inconsistent, redundant, and out-of-date information, which enables us to fix these problems, makes our searches faster and more accurate, and improves our ability to make high-quality decisions.”
- Improved compliance and discovery efficiency. Because Marathon now has a structured way to clean up its information, employees can better align with internal policies and regulatory requirements. With more streamlined information stores and the ability to search for information down to the individual TeamView or MyView, Marathon can more quickly and easily meet legal discovery demands.
- Slower information growth rate. Marathon now has companywide document retention rules that govern which documents, both electronic and physical, are saved and for how long. “We are slowing the rate of information growth by having a more disciplined retention management strategy,” Smith says. “In addition, people are now quite aware of the risks associated with having multiple copies of the same information.”
An information management focus makes Marathon a more efficient, productive company that can better compete in today’s tough energy markets.
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