Petrochem/Utilities Industry Trends

New Mission and Vision for API's PIDX Committee

Issue Table of Contents

New Electronic Standards Aim to Increase Efficiency of Oil and Natural Gas Industry Transactions New Mission and Vision for API's PIDX Committee Information Technology - Crossing Industry Lines Global B2B E-Commerce Standardization Making It Possible

Randy Clark represents Baker Hughes' strategic e-business interests through his involvement as Chairman of the American Petroleum Institute's (API) Petroleum Industry Data Exchange (PIDX) Committee. "As the new chair, I have put together a new mission and vision for PIDX that should help launch it into an integrated, global standards body. We're really focused on finding new ways to enable seamless exchange of data in our industry."

The new vision objectives for PIDX include:

• Providing truly global electronic standards for the petroleum industry
  
• Focusing on business solutions to enable electronic business in the industry
  
• Seeking out the most qualified people to participate in the standards development efforts
  
• Continually assessing the PIDX value proposition to ensure that the committee is truly bringing value to the industry

The five basic areas of concentration are:

• Revitalization
  PIDX wants to update and revitalize the Petroleum Industry Data Dictionary (PIDD). Needed to implement Extensible Markup Language (XML), PIDD is a repository of preferred meanings of business and technology terms for the petroleum industry
  
  
• Information
  Business messages - focus on documents, architecture and core components and security
  
  
• Integration
  Integration of business processes - trying to find ways to standardize externally facing business processes so that it's more than just an exchange of messages, it's alignment and agreement in terms of the business processes used between trading partners
  
  
• Globalization
  Most member companies of PIDX are multinational corporations with businesses all over the world. Therefore, PIDX wants to address global issues (i.e. legal, accounting, language) that will enable the member companies to conduct business worldwide
  
  
• Collaboration
  PIDX is actively working with other SDOs to come up with harmonized standards

"I'm a firm believer in sharing," Clark comments. "If we can gain permission and leverage nonproprietary standards that are already out there, we should. Also, if we can share our unique expertise with other standards organizations and come up with a better solution that benefits us all, we should do that, too," Clark continued. "We've restructured in order to establish a better integration in our standards efforts," Clark explains. "Our focus for the near future will not only be on XML-based standards and business messages, but also on business processes and other new Web services and technologies that are out there."

The restructuring added a new subcommittee called Adoption and Participation. Now, the three subcommittees at PIDX include:

• Standards
• Promotion
• Adoption and Participation (new)

PIDX's new vision and strategy is designed to ensure that the standards developed are open to all to use, globally applicable, and widely adopted by the global industry and its trading partners. "As the first person from a service company to chair PIDX, I feel I bring a unique perspective to this organization," states Clark.

For more information on the program, please contact Sarita Leassear-Clark, API PIDX, at (202) 682-8491 or Leassear@api.org.

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