The oil and gas sector is ripe for a digital revolution. It’s a crucial global energy supply network requiring extensive collaboration between businesses, industries, and governments.
However, digital transformation has been slow and inconsistent in the oil and gas industry, resulting in wasted resources and missed opportunities. While the industry bears some responsibility for its resistance to change, its unique challenges impede its full utilization of IT capabilities.
Let’s delve into the five key challenges hindering oil and gas businesses from effectively implementing IT solutions and leveraging the full potential of recent technological advancements in the field.
What Are the IT Challenges in the Oil and Gas Industry?
IT challenges in the oil and gas industry stem from the sector's unique operational complexity—spanning remote locations, hazardous environments, aging infrastructure, and stringent regulatory requirements. The five most critical IT challenges are:
Top IT challenges faced in the oil and gas industry
Here are the top IT challenges that riddle the oil and gas industry:
1. Legacy systems and infrastructure
Many oil and gas businesses use legacy systems and infrastructure, which is prone to downtime, costly to maintain, and riddled with security risks. Legacy systems are also difficult to integrate with newer applications and technologies.
While oil and gas businesses embarked on digital transformation journeys and introduced more intuitive frontends for a better end-user experience, the backend legacy systems remained the same.
Extensive customizations and expensive upgrades of legacy systems have complicated business processes and data entry.
Adding to that is the problem of the messy middle, where all the internal operations between the frontend and backend are located. The applications in the middle layer are either overlooked or built in silos, creating disparate systems that don’t work well as a unified unit.
2. Complex workflows and manual processes
Workflows in the oil and gas industry can be extremely complex, with intricate processes, multiple stakeholders, and strict safety regulations
The oil and gas sector has several specialized processes which are spread across different geographical locations. Most of these processes are manual and disparate and can lead to silos across the organization, making collaboration challenging.
Additionally, the involvement of numerous decision-makers poses a significant challenge in keeping everyone informed.
3. Data management challenges
Oil and gas businesses deal with a lot of data regularly, from exploration to extraction, refining, processing, and distribution.
However, efficiently managing data and extracting insights from it is where businesses fall behind. Manual processes, disparate applications, and lack of collaboration mean that all the necessary data gets siloed.
Companies require robust data management capabilities to deal with the vast amount of data. Investing in streamlined data management enables businesses to collect, analyze, and use data for effective decision-making.
4. Compliance and regulatory requirements
Oil and gas businesses must follow multiple regulatory compliances, including safety standards, data privacy laws, and environmental laws. Even the smallest mistakes can have disastrous consequences for the people, environment, and business. Stringent standards ensure safety and maintain the overall quality of the processes.
Without the right workflows in place, it can be difficult to track and comply with the ever-changing regulations in the industry.
5. Collaboration and communication
All the key processes in the oil and gas industry are interconnected and require collaboration across different teams and departments. There is a need for quick decision-making in the energy sector, which can only be possible with the integration of processes, applications, and systems, along with the ability to collaborate effectively.
However, the legacy systems combined with the messy middle have scattered operations, disjointed processes, and created data silos, making collaboration and communication challenging.
These challenges share a common thread: fragmented systems and manual processes that prevent IT from driving operational efficiency rather than constraining it.
Solutions for the Top 5 IT Challenges in the Oil & Gas Industry
While IT challenges in the oil and gas industry are complex, leading enterprises are solving them with modern, workflow-driven IT solutions. Instead of replacing core ERP or OT systems, organizations are adopting digital operations platforms that streamline business processes, automate compliance, and enable IT and business teams to work together at scale.
Challenge 1: Legacy Systems and Technical Debt
Solution: Digital Operations Layer Above Existing Systems
Oil & gas enterprises address legacy system constraints by introducing a digital operations layer that works alongside ERP, CMMS, and SCADA systems. This approach modernizes business processes without disrupting mission-critical infrastructure.
Challenge 2: Fragmented Business Processes
Solution: End-to-End Business Process Automation
Modern IT solutions unify approvals, case management, and operational workflows across departments, eliminating manual handoffs, email-based tracking, and disconnected tools.
Challenge 3: Compliance, HSE, and Regulatory Complexity
Solution: Compliance-First Workflow Automation
Enterprises automate compliance workflows with built-in audit trails, role-based controls, and real-time reporting—ensuring regulatory readiness without increasing IT workload.
Challenge 4: IT Backlogs and Limited Development Capacity
Solution: Governed Citizen Development
Oil & gas companies reduce IT backlogs by enabling business users to build workflows under IT governance—accelerating delivery without compromising security or standards.
Challenge 5: Lack of Real-Time Operational Visibility
Solution: Centralized Dashboards and Workflow Intelligence
IT leaders gain real-time visibility into operational processes through dashboards that track approvals, incidents, compliance status, and performance across sites and regions.
Why is it important for oil and gas companies to solve these IT challenges?
To stay competitive and relevant, oil and gas companies need to digitally transform their operations, adopt modern applications and technologies, break down data silos, and streamline complex processes.
While it may not be possible to replace legacy systems completely, organizations can resolve the messy middle problem by introducing a unified platform to connect the frontend with the backend and streamline all the internal operations in the middle.
Replacing complex and manual processes with digitized workflows can optimize internal operations, reduce costly manual errors, and decrease bottlenecks.
Digitized workflows can also optimize data management, allowing businesses to drive insights from vast amounts of data and enable effective decision-making.
In addition to increased productivity and efficiency, oil and gas companies can improve collaboration, track compliance regulations more closely, and respond to emerging challenges in real-time.
How low-code platforms can simplify IT for oil and gas
Deploying solutions through traditional development for resolving the major IT challenges plaguing the oil and gas sector can be complicated, time-consuming, and overburdening for your IT team.
Low-code platforms can resolve major IT challenges by transforming complex processes into streamlined workflows. Teams can use a visual drag-and-drop editor and reusable components to build custom applications that align with their main challenges and requirements. Applications that would otherwise take months of development time can get up and running in less than a week.
With a reduced burden on the IT team, you can increase the scale of digitization and achieve more in less time.
Low-code platforms can also fix the messy middle problem by streamlining middle operations between the backend legacy systems and the modernized frontend.
By addressing critical IT issues, low-code platforms can optimize production, improve operational reliability, boost collaboration, and make data management easier.
What Are the Best IT Solutions for the Oil and Gas Industry?
The best IT solutions for the oil and gas industry focus on modernizing business processes without disrupting core systems. These include digital operations platforms, workflow automation, compliance-first solutions, and governed low-code tools that reduce IT backlogs while improving operational visibility and control.
Kissflow: The leading low-code platform for oil and gas companies
Kissflow is purpose-built to help oil and gas enterprises overcome IT and business process challenges without disrupting existing systems. As a low-code digital operations platform, Kissflow enables organizations to modernize workflows, improve compliance, and accelerate transformation—while keeping IT firmly in control.
Kissflow is a unified low-code platform that helps businesses operating in the oil and gas industry to digitize and manage their internal operations.
With its workflow automation capabilities, Kissflow can automate critical processes like data management, invoicing, compliance, and asset management. It can integrate seamlessly with existing legacy systems and technologies that are common in the oil and gas sector and improve efficiency, productivity, and collaboration.
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