BP’S OFFICE OF THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER(A): DRIVING

OPEN INNOVATION THROUGH AN ADVOCATE TEAM

Topic:

• One of the top multinational oil and gas businesses, BP offers its clients fuel for vehicles,
energy for heating and lighting, retail services, and petrochemical materials for use in
everyday items.

• Operating in 30 nations.

• Acquired AMCO in 1997 and ARCO in 1999,

• Joint venture investment in Russia's Tyumen Oil company exceeds $8 billion.

• This is the third-largest energy company in the world and the fourth-largest business overall.

Problem Statement

• Can BP DCT division and the CTO office add more value to the business without
compromising performance and credibility earned through its previous success ?

• In what way should CTO's office respond to the difficulties faced by the DCT advisory group?

• Had their innovation advocacy model gone so far as to sacrifice performance due to scale?

Alternatives/options:

1. Horizontal and vertical expansion

2. Evaluation of current model

3. Evaluate implemented projects and optimize the process

4. New approaches to IT investments

Analysis of the alternatives/options and impacts:

Horizontal and vertical expansions

• Increase the resources- it may be financial or human personnel.

• Increase the coverage to the new business units of BP. i.e., Bringing new business units to
cater to emerging markets.

• Improving existing communications which means better coordination with business units
through liaison officers and publishing the accomplishments of the CTO office inside Bp.

Evaluation of current model

• Increase the proactive gathering of business requirements.

• Hire experts to more thoroughly examine VCs.

• Test all developing technologies with various BUs to address the biggest issues with safety,
the environment, and health.

• Make the CTO responsible for the complete project execution.

Evaluation and optimization

• Evaluate the implemented projects and their success for consistency.

• Address the problems if any with implemented technology

• Adopt methods to track the cost productivity gains and efficiency for the technology
implementation.

• Search new technologies for real-time disasters/problems.

New approaches to IT investments

• With the project success rate hovering at around 30% for many years, BP should try
and adopt an innovative approach towards IT investment.

• Adopting the six stages approach maximizes the value of IT investments both for
CTO as well as Business units at Bp

Define Business drivers and investment owners

Identify benefits, measures and owners

Structure the benefits

Identify the organizational changes enabling benefits

Determine explicit value at each benefit

Identify costs and risks

• BP CTO should try and streamline their existing model towards the Six stage
approach.

CONCLUSION

• The organisation has all the potential for technological and financial expansion a due to its
evolution over the past six years through vendor-based approaches to evaluating digital
technologies and a variety of intelligent push methods by examining business unit
requirements.