The Oil Industry: A Need For Standards

Working as a consultant really gives you the opportunity to travel. This week, the office of an oil company … the next, an office in the water industry … and the following week, still more variety—an office in the finance sector. Now capable of writing a thesis on the correlation between wallpapers and SIC codes, we turn our attention to the records held by each industry sector, and the way in which those records are managed. The practice of records management varies considerably from industry to industry and, within industry sectors, from company to company. So the oil industry tends to practice records management in a different way from the water industry or the finance industry. Certainly the oil industry faces particular problems in the range of media which it is required to handle, including well logs, seismic data, oil samples, as well as the inevitable quantities of paper and paper substitutes which all industries face. But not only does records management vary from industry to industry, it also varies from company to company—and so individual companies active within the oil industry operate a variety of records management procedures. A company's records management programme may include a number of elements—and I should like to review the most important of these before looking at the potential for standardisation in record management practices. The major elements within a records management programme may include the following: