Making Unstructured info StructuredVery often in Business we have some sort of agreements between business partners, with government etc.This is often in the form of a document, text based and vulnerable for different interpretations etc.Statoil´s Product Sharing Agreements (PSA) describing obligations, requirements, possibilities etc. related to this license

PSADocument

Essential facts describing this info:Shared between several partners, government etc.Basically unstructured information, text based, unreadable for traditional computer etc.Vulnerable for different interpretations both internally in a company and between partners etc.Often associated with disagreements, legal disputes etc.

Can we structure this or part of this:Could we split this into two part one text based and on consisting of concrete figures, rules etc.This could be like keeping a slimmer version of this document and an Excel file etc. incl. the restThe Excel file will be 100% clearly defined rules, clearly structured etc.This Excel file can be shared with organisations and across partners etc. ensuring uniformityIn this way we have structured some of this valuable unstructured info.

Costly Experience:My experience is that the structuring process briefly described above is seldom don when such and agreement is createdThe original agreement could have been so much more clear, non-vulnerable, structured, user friendly etc.Also if this do no exist from the start its very seldom that this job is even done very properly uniformly at a later stage!Result is as often is that users within an organisation, different partners etc. are judging this individually with the risk thereafter

We did this structuring for the Statoil PSAs very thoroughly and the cost/benefit was major and key to any IT/IS success thereafter