ConocoPhillips: Standard, Not Sexy

Common systems are the rule at ConocoPhillips. By Julia King

By Julia King

October 30, 2006 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - Growth is the name of the game at ConocoPhillips. In the past 20 months alone, the energy behemoth has embarked on a $4 billion-plus program to expand its U.S. refining operations; acquired Burlington Resources, a major U.S. gas explorer and producer; increased its ownership stake in Duke Energy Field Services, one of the country’s largest gas processors and marketers; and launched a large liquefied natural gas project that supplies natural gas from Qatar to the U.S.

And that all comes on the heels of a five-year diet of acquisitions and mergers, beginning with Phillips Petroleum Co.’s 2001 acquisition of Tosco Corp., one of the world’s largest oil refiners.

	Mega IT
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Today — and going forward — the main challenge for IT at ConocoPhillips is building and operating a gigantic yet standardized technology infrastructure that can integrate these and other new acquisitions and business projects quickly and cost-effectively.

Marty Schoenthaler, general manager of information services, ConocoPhillips

“It’s not real sexy,” acknowledges Marty Schoenthaler, general manager of information services at the $183 billion company. “But scale is what is so key in our industry. For almost four years [since Conoco and Phillips merged in 2002], we have been working on driving integration and converging systems.” The ultimate goal, he says, is to create a technology foundation that can be used worldwide to support a comprehensive set of global business processes.

Global Standards

The ticket is standardization — make that hyperstandardization. Today, all of ConocoPhillips runs on a single instance of SAP enterprise software. The company has also standardized on Dell hardware and Microsoft Office software and tools. That’s a long way from the dozens of different e-mail and desktop systems that existed across the two individual companies in 2002.

“As we go through acquisitions and otherwise grow as a company, it makes it that much easier to build off that foundation,” Schoenthaler notes. “When we acquired Burlington earlier this year, we were able to drop it right into our [global SAP] system.”

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