Chevron’s Chief Digital Officer: “Digital Transformation is a ‘Pandora’s Box’”

As organizations seek to harness the benefits of disruptive new technologies, many have found themselves heavy on the disruption and light on the technology adoption.

But it doesn’t need to be that way, according to Jason Gislason, Chief Digital Officer, Chevron Phillips Chemical Company.

Digital transformation is “a Pandora’s box,” he observes.  “You open it up – you start seeing the possibilities, you start seeing the benefits that you get from a digital transformation. What you find out is that you can never really go back.”

But it’s also an area that’s rife with risk. Many organizations struggle to get digital initiatives off the ground, or they develop applications only to find at the end of an extensive development process that users simply don’t use it.

Speaking at our recent Operational Excellence in Oil and Gas conference in Houston late last year, Gislason had some advice on how to avoid these common pitfalls of digital transformation.

#1. Don’t overcomplicate things

Keep technology, processes and procedures simple. This is especially so in high risk environments such as refineries, where human error can lead to critical safety incidents. Gislason says that even a number of small changes multiplied out can add up to significant business value. Most important is to ensure that you’re not just distracted by the latest, shiny new technology. “If you end up doing a lot with technology for technology’s sake, you just waste a lot of money and time,” he explains.

#2. Wait for the business to be ready to engage

If the business is not ready for the transformation, the effort to achieve it can be too high in relation to the business value it brings. His advice, in those instances, is to wait until the business is ready and available to engage. IT shouldn’t be forcing technology onto the business.

“One of the most critical things I’ve found is having a full time product owner on our scrum teams,” he says. “If you don’t have a full time product owner who truly understands the business it’s like having a high powered race car running down the track and the driver’s not in the car. You’ll develop something and you’ll get there really fast and then once you develop it nobody’s using it and you don’t understand why.”

#3. Enable employees’ ideas

The best ideas come from frontline workers and employees. Gislason says that it’s important to ensure that you’re giving your teams the scope and ability to innovate and run with their ideas. Leaders need to listen and react to the feedback they receive. “I always tell people that I want your idea because if I tell you how to do it, I’m going to screw it up!” he says.

#4. Prepare to unlearn old ways of doing things

With digital disruption you can’t do things the way you’ve always done them. But it can be hard to change decades of accumulated knowledge and processes. It takes time to bring people along on that journey to unlearn old habits and create new ones. But Gislason is optimistic that once people have made the leap to a new way of working, they will be unwilling to return to the old.  

“People want to work efficiently. They want to be more effective. They want to be more engaged,” he says. “They want to be more engaged with creative problem solving, which they’re really very good at. And they want to remove from their work the things that computers are really good at [repetitive, low value work].”

#5. Be patient and stay the course

Digital transformation is not an easy process. It takes time for people to learn new ways of operating and start to see the benefits from technology. At the beginning it is easy to think that digital transformation is simply disruptive and not accomplishing anything.

“Stay the course. Understand that you’re going to get a ton of pushback. You’ve got to just keep going,” says Gislason. “Engage people. Help them know that you’re not trying to take away their opportunities. You’re trying to present them with new opportunities.”

The second time around, he adds, “it’s like watching the same movie with different actors.”

“Flipping the Odds on Digital Transformation Success: Exclusive Fire Side Chat with Jason Gislason, Chief Digital Officer, Chevron Phillips Chemical Company,” was held at Oil and Gas IQ’s Operational Excellence in Oil and Gas in Houston, November 2021. Want to learn more? Jason will be presenting at our upcoming Connected Worker event in Houston next month. Find out more at The Connected Worker Summit (oilandgasiq.com)