Business systems for knowledge management in the NGL industry

We are at the beginning of a fundamental paradigm shift that will move us from an industrial based society to the information age. The scale and pace of change currently experienced is minor compared to that expected in the near future. Information intensive industries such as gas processing, marketing and trading will be effected dramatically. Information will become the new currency of power, and we will need to manage knowledge as carefully as we currently manage money. Effective knowledge management involves a complex blend of culture, structure, process and technology. Traditional organization structures, processes and systems cannot deal with the new volume and velocity of information. Separate functional departments such as marketing, operations. logistics and accounting typically have separate functional systems or modules. These separate structures and systems create islands of information and barriers to effective knowledge management. New cross-functional structures, processes and systems offer a fundamentally different approach. Cross-functional systems support marketing, operations, logistics and accounting activities from a single, shared data repository. Unlike separate systems, or even integrated modular systems, each data element is stored once and only once. All information is available to the entire organization in near real time as soon as it is captured. These types of systems can support various organizational structures and processes, including cross-functional teams. Change is not easy, but organizations that act on this opportunity early will gain a significant competitive advantage. Those that do not change quickly enough are unlikely to survive.