2010 may be year of the Tiger, but for Chevron it is consolidating projects and data, at least as decreed by Chevron's CIO, Denise Coyne for IT strategy. At the same time, Chevron has indicated that its budget will remain the same in 2010 (flat with 2009), however, the allocation of the budget will be prioritized based on Chevron's IT strategy for 2010.

IDC Energy Insights predicted that the oil and gas companies will tackle information management this year. From our view, the information is segregated into content that does not interact with each other and therefore fails to achieve integrity and maximum business value. We feel oil and gas companies will develop a governance structure that can extract the most value from their data. (Alright, one company may not make a trend, but IDC believes this issue has been on the table for some time, and companies have struggled to remedy the situation. Is pressure on IT budgets making these issues a priority for companies, to make the most of what they have versus investing in new technologies?) Chevron confirms that in flat budgets, this is a priority for them.

Our previous research indicated that a formal, very centralized governance structure was a critical component in IT strategy at Chevron. In January 2010, Chevron's CIO indicated that they remain committed to a view of the entire enterprise, which supports the ability to prioritize all IT projects. Chevron said the drivers right now for this strategy include managing costs and ensuring that "every project…is adding significant value to the bottom line."

The examples provided by Chevron of consolidation were in the areas of environmental systems and training systems. The consolidation is leading to pilot enterprise projects, and, reinforcing that the best way to get the value from the data is an enterprise wide system. This appears to be a strong indication that there are significant cost savings if these systems are administered in a centralized versus a federated model. And getting the ultimate business value from the information.

Chevron's CIO also cited that data quality is the greatest trend they see in 2010. If so, it appears that vendors may be well positioned with solutions that provide data cleansing and uploading despite the commodity nature of the task. And, it's a clear message by one of the largest oil and gas companies that validation of data is critical to the decision-making environment.

Does this strategy direction from Chevron allow for information technology solutions that provide better integration of the exploration and production processes? Will companies with a less enterprise focused approach suffer in the data environment, or will these consolidation projects never deliver?