From Integrated to Remote Operations: Digital Transformation in the Energy Industry as Infrastructuring

Abstract

The energy industry in Norway has a long tradition in using information technology to enable integrated operations, namely, remote collaboration between personnel at offshore installations and experts at onshore office environments. Currently, the industry is undergoing a digital transformation in which remote operations of unmanned offshore assets are the emerging standard. To ensure trustworthy and reliable operations, offshore remote sensing capabilities must be established through not only technical means but also a broader transformation involving new competence, work processes, and governance principles. In this chapter, we reconstruct this transformation and ask: What are the emerging capabilities that develop around the remote operation digital infrastructure? We unpack how the new digital infrastructure is a continuation of the practices and systems that have been established over time. We use historical reconstruction with vignettes from the development of a new generation of remotely operated offshore installations in oil and gas and wind facilities to describe the ongoing digital transformation as a process of infrastructuring in which the infrastructure gets increasingly entangled with internal and external systems, stakeholders, and agendas. In doing so, we shed light on how the established local and situated solutions evolve and are compensated for through the technical and organizational principles of the emerging information infrastructure.