From Software Anarchy to Software Governance: A Customer Case Study

Eistein Fosli
OpeniT, Houston, TX

This presentation will show how measuring software usage was the first step toward changing corporate culture at Burlington Resources from one of software anarchy to one of software governance. While building a compre-hensive software management strategy, BR identified many opportunities to optimize the distribution of software between its divisions and discontinue duplicative or extraneous software. Transitioning and training geoscientists who found that their “favorite” software had been replaced by a “standard” software was particularly difficult. Ongoing issues include deciding the right level of tolerance for software denials, how to manage “specialty” soft-ware, and how to evolve as new software opportunities become available.
After two years of measuring software usage and pro-actively managing software, BR IT savings reached $5,000,000. However, the overall impact of developing a more disciplined corporate culture resulted in an annual savings of nearly 20 times their initial IT savings.

Presentation GEO India Expo XXI, Noida, New Delhi, India 2008©AAPG Search and Discovery