Derek Mitchell - Managing Director & Principal Consultant

"When I graduated in the early 1990's my first job was optimising North Sea oil producers' maintenance and integrity management systems. Oil was below $20/bbl and on the back of the Cullen Report (1990) into the Piper Alpha disaster (1988), there could be no compromising on safety standards when reducing running costs. It was an innovative time and rich in learnings for me, but despite all the technological advances since, a couple of observations from back then are still true today:

1. Even the best implemented system cannot work effectively without good quality content;

2. Organisations are awash with 'management systems'.

Down the years I've been involved with all manner of management systems in a variety of organisations and have concluded that we really need to adopt a more joined-up approach. e.g. Simply sharing information-management platforms (e.g. SharePoint/Teams, Content Server, et al.) does not in itself provide a consistent approach to information management let alone any level of business process integration. 

In an ever more complex and fast-moving world, today's leaders and managers (and I'm not just talking about those in the energy sector) need to be able to communicate what their company stands for, what the various parts of the business do, and in many cases, provide prescriptive instruction for how certain activities are performed and outcomes assured.

One way to do this in a dynamic but sustainable way that supports good corporate governance, is to move away from the siloed, functional approach and have a single, integrated management system.

If you'd like to discuss how that approach could work in your business, please do contact me."