Enterprise Content Management at Statoil
Statoil is the world’s third largest exporter of crude oil and a substantial supplier of natural gas to the European market. The company has approximately 25,500 employees in locations scattered over 34 countries. Based in Norway, Statoil is the leading operator on the Norwegian continental shelf and experiencing strong growth in international production.
Since 2002, the company has adopted an e collaboration strategy. The goal of the strategy is to create a corporate “knowledge reservoir” that provides global access to a common pool of digital assets and is used to support work processes and share information between Statoil and its customers, employees, and business partners.
Access to this knowledge reservoir is provided through an information portal and controlled through the assignment of end-user roles. For instance, a customer would have much more limited access to information housed in the knowledge reservoir than a Statoil employee would. The need for this strategy arose for the information overload that burdened the company. Typical for many decentralized organizations, Statoil’s information was scattered across a number of different storage media applications. The total number of databases in 2002 exceeded 5,500. The core foundation of the knowledge reservoir is content management. This involves the ability to support a content life cycle in the company that effectively deals with the capture, transformation, storage, security, distribution, retrieval, and eventual destruction of documents. Though Statoil is making great gains in facilitating such content management practices, it is also facing some challenges in getting there.