We talked to Hugh Ritchie, Industry Manager for Energy and Manufacturing at Open Text recently about the energy sector and what organizations are doing to manage their content. Read part one of the interview today. We'll post part two later this week.

Hugh Ritchie: Power plant operators run highly complex plants and plant systems. The complexity is due to having to meet higher efficiency levels, environmental constraints, safety standards, cost savings and now, even high flexibility. This is true for power plants and utility companies in regulated and deregulated markets.

Open Text: What effect does all the complex business requirements this have on ECM systems?

Hugh Ritchie: Advanced technology works best with ECM software. Due to the increased complexity, advanced software is necessary to manage all the information and to meet all the requirements. ECM software enables power plant operators to decisively improve their knowledge management, optimize processes and lower documentation costs, increase knowledge around fixed assets, and drive business costs down. In terms of information management, power plant operators are faced with a number of challenges such as lost knowledge and know-how, process efficiency, efficiencies in managing change, and version control.

Open Text: What opportunities and risks are hidden in these challenges?

Hugh Ritchie: On the process efficiency front, processes that are complex, unstructured, interdisciplinary and time-intensive now have to be optimized, in particular, to improve cooperation between departments, locations, partners and suppliers. To this end, the way a company handles its information and documents has to be adapted to today's business processes. For example, more and more frequently, employees based at different locations have to work together. While the knowledge applied in plant construction, operation and maintenance has taken a century to gather is even harder to find when the key knowledge holders walk out the door. The lost know-how, experienced engineers, technicians, administrators and decision-makers organize their documents individually or leave the company and take their knowledge with them. Important information for making decisions is then no longer available. On the other hand in Capital Projects many specialists and specialized companies work together on complex projects with time pressures that often mean a deeper division of labor that if not captured needs to be recreated often at a great expense to the company.

So, it is a question of managing unstructured information and documents that simply sit in personal inboxes, file shares, public folders, SharePoint sites, departmental archives and paper archives and making the information available to the right people at the right time.

To further compound the problem with the new ways employees communicate -- digitally, by phone, on paper, with multiple versions in duplicate with unclear responsibilities, tasks and due dates the problems get larger.

Open Text: Your third point, ensuring version control, is that really such a major issue for the industry?

Hugh Ritchie: Documentation costs do in fact represent a major problem. In the last few years, the energy industry in North American and Europe has adjusted itself to the mandate for documentation from several laws and directives, including market regulation, environmental constraints and safety provisions. These documentation requirements result in huge costs, slow down processes and reduce flexibility. The networks and plants are even frequently documented five times in five different systems (construction, operation, maintenance, accounting, malfunction repair). In the case of malfunctions, the operator must demonstrate that the plant has been routinely maintained, the right checks performed, and that the training of its personnel was up to date.

Look for part two on Wednesday.