Urgent data migration sparks energy company’s land management transformation

With an intense focus that matched the urgency of this engagement, Grant Thornton simultaneously pushed forward through multiple workstreams — gathering key stakeholders, designing an enhanced system, migrating the data, and implementing business intelligence and process automation capabilities for better decision-making.

We initiated the project by leading a series of collaborative workshops, bringing together our team with our client’s IT and business stakeholders, the legacy and new data platform vendors, and third-party support personnel.

During this kickoff phase, we established roles, responsibilities and alignment among the many parties involved. We also established a governance framework to define policies, roles and security measures, ensuring operational integrity and compliance. When we encountered data quality issues, our specialists investigated them promptly and worked with the client’s personnel to resolve the problems quickly.

Using our deep energy industry knowledge, we created data architecture hierarchies that easily enabled our client’s various personnel to get the information they needed. For example, while we set up one hierarchy for land administrators, landmen and land analysts to perform research based on geographic location, our client’s ownership relations personnel needed a hierarchy that would show them data for owners who had property in multiple geographies. We established a data framework that enabled all users of the data to view the relevant files according to their specific needs, incorporating our knowledge of the users and the different types of agreements that are common in an offshore exploration business that has joint ventures in place with various owners.

With this foundation in place, we led the design of the SharePoint metadata model and object hierarchy, performed source and target data mapping, and developed data transformation processes on the Azure platform. SharePoint was chosen because it improved collaboration and aligned the business solutions to corporate solutions. With SharePoint, the client can give various employees shared access to documents through links so that they all can work within the system. Previously, employees had to download documents to share them, and they had to work outside the system. The SharePoint capabilities introduced strong version control for the documents and eliminated the need for employees to download and email documents to one another.

While Grant Thornton’s primary responsibility was to migrate the legacy platform documents, our team also went beyond expectations by bringing in individuals to support the client in all five other workstreams. For instance, this involved assisting in the implementation of Power BI tools to facilitate business intelligence capabilities that would help the client significantly improve their use of the migrated data. Additionally, when the client’s workstream duties exceeded resourcing capacity during various phases of the project, Grant Thornton immediately brought in team members to supplement our client’s resources, alleviating the strain to move this project forward before the project deadline.

With such a tight deadline imposed, our teams worked collaboratively with the client’s personnel toward successfully completing the project. When we encountered obstacles, we moved quickly along with the client as one unit to resolve the issues we faced, building trust and acting with a shared sense of responsibility to deliver on the project’s goals.

As our team progressed through the project phases, we observed opportunities for our client to drive substantial functional improvements through new technology and integration with the company’s existing systems.

For example, we recommended optical character recognition capabilities be implemented so that leases could be converted into machine-readable text. This capability then led our team to introduce specialists knowledgeable about Microsoft Copilot to show our client how Copilot and natural language processing tools could be used to examine and compare various provisions within the contracts — a functionality that can lead to substantial time savings.