From enforcer to ally: How the NSTA's approach to data is changing the oil industry

The regulator has a 'completely different relationship with the data community', says CIO John Seabourn

By engaging data professionals and executives, the NSTA is welcomed with respect instead of being treated with suspicion.

Regulators are a little like a new baby: important but demanding, and best held at arm's length.*

* Please don't try this at home.

John Seabourn, CIO at the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), is changing that groupthink by transforming the regulator's relationship with the data community.

The first step - creating a new data-centric role in every oil and gas company – has raised the value of IT and data professionals in the industry.

Since then, NSTA has leveraged the data it collects to bring the industry together. It's still a competition, of course, but now oil giants can see the benefits of sharing data.

With a level of trust and respect established for data and data professionals, the next step was launching what John calls "Tier Zero" meetings for C-level executives.

"We do an annual stewardship exercise where we collect a whole host of information. Our policy planning and reporting team pull all of that together - load of benchmarks - and we play that back to the top 22 producers in the UK, so a data-driven way of showing them how they compare with all of their peers...

"It shows them how they're doing on their production efficiency, how they're doing on emissions, and a whole host of other measures; but we also do it on data. So, how good is your data reporting? Have you got any missing gaps in what you're doing?"

This year NSTA went one step further: instead of just showing the data, the regulator told producers about what it expects of them: "Where we're really expecting them to be and where we want them to drive to."

This new approach has created a "completely different relationship with the data community."

"It used to be very much, ‘It's a regulator asking us for this, we need to protect ourselves and not do too much', versus now it's like, 'We're data professionals, we all want to do better as a community of data professionals.'

"Whether you work in the regulator or the operator or the service industry, everyone's on the same page. We feel like our whole industry has been elevated, because we've put some importance on it.

"That's been driven from us as the regulator to do that."

John's approach has been to discourage the industry "moaning" about regulations, and to encourage them to ask for help with compliance.

Having executives at the Tier Zero meetings has changed how they view and treat data.

"Those senior people can then go back into their organisations and say, 'Why am I at the bottom of this list for data quality? I want that to improve.'"

Those executives don't simply demand work from people; knowing the importance of data, they help IT teams get what they need.

"You've got somebody senior in your organisation who's now aware of this sort of stuff. Tell them you need money, tell them you need people, tell them you need improvements on the supply chain, and all of that will start to happen. So, we've really seen that kind of step forward from everybody in the data and IT professions to make that happen."