Life is less dull with a little chaos. Without disruption, that drastic altering of structure, historians would have little to write about. Humans are tinkerers. We’re always pushing the limits. We leave well enough alone for just as long as necessary for it to take root and hold. Then from there, we add or subtract; we branch out in new directions and break off the pieces that don’t fit—we disrupt.

For example, thanks to a little tinkering and dogged persistence, the petroleum world was set on its collective ear with the evolutionary one-two combo of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. The global market pushed back and with a snip here and tweak there, a balance has been struck and a leaner industry has emerged.

Rather than dwell on the challenges from 2016 that led to that leaner industry, Lorenzo Simonelli, president and CEO of GE Oil & Gas, shared how the company is evolving at its 18th Annual Meeting recently in Florence, Italy.

“I, like you, am here because I want to chart a new course for the industry around connectivity and growth,” he told attendees. “We’re heading into 2017 with the ambition of disrupting the status quo. We’re turning the tables as leaders in this industry and harnessing disruption in many ways.”

He shared that one way the company will do this through its role as a supplier is by bringing solutions that put technology in the center, but that GE Oil & Gas will not stop in its efforts to serve the customer.

“We’ve learned that to be disruptive, we need to adopt a new mindset that challenges tradition and bureaucracy,” Simonelli said. “We have found that when you are being disruptive, structures need to evolve. Industries need to transform for the better.”

The first way the company is “harnessing disruption” is through collaboration. “Today, instead of operating and developing solutions in isolation, we innovate in close collaboration with our customers. This involves sharing design concepts, testing, failing fast and landing together, a process at GE we call ‘Fast Works’. In this way we foster a relationship of mutual trust and respect that values both parties.”

The second is through digitization, which he said was, “the single largest change for the industry and the foundation for its future. We’re driving the industry forward to unlock this potential.”

He added that, according to a McKinsey study, the effective use of digital technologies in the oil and gas sector could reduce capex by about 20%.

“Today only 3% to 5% of oil and gas equipment is connected. The average offshore rig has 30,000 sensors that are generating, typically, less than 1% of the data that are used to make decisions,” Simonelli said. “The data are stuck in data graveyards, where they lie dormant, unanalyzed and fail[ing] to grant insight on their decision- making. Fewer than 24% of operators describe their maintenance approach as being predictive when based on data and analytics.

“Using Big Data, operators can proactively make their decisions. With Predix, our cloud-based operating system for the industrial Internet, we’re driving much-needed transformation for our industry.”

In closing, Simonelli said, “Resilience, disruption [and] collaboration will pave the road to recovery.” Just as they have for as long as humans have tinkered.

Contact the author, Jennifer Presley, at jpresley@hartenergy.com.

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