Social Networking and Online Collaboration in the Oil and Gas Industry

Abstract

Forum - Social networking and online collaboration in the oil and gas industry. “He, who owns the information, owns the world.” This famous phrase by Winston Churchill might sound like a cliché, but it is particularly relevant today. “The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the 50-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker,” said author Peter Drucker back in 1959. This was when the term “knowledge worker” was defined. Also, the third wave of human socioeconomic development is described in the book The Fifth Generation Management (Savage, 1996) as the Age of Knowledge. Web 2.0 and social networking platforms have revolutionized the way we collaborate and communicate with others. One prominent example of a social network service is, of course, Facebook, which boasts some 350 million users. To put that community size in perspective, if Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s third largest, superseded only by China and India. In addition, online forums allow hundreds and thousands of people to unify their efforts to discuss and solve problems. Video snippets are recorded and uploaded to YouTube. Groups are formed on Facebook unifying people with similar interests across the world. Wikipedia is growing by the minute and contains more than 15 million articles in 270 languages, with all of the content written collaboratively by unpaid Internet volunteers.