With over 25 plus years of experience, David Myers is an operational and IT leader in oil and gas, operational consulting, retail, and financial services.  For the last 4.5 years, he has served as the Chief Information Officer at Diversified Energy, where he is responsible for acquisition integration, IT, cloud/infrastructure, operational technologies, SCADA, I&E, cyber security, internal measurement, production accounting, enterprise data warehouse, field analytics and the call center.  He has a proven record of developing and implementing business and operational processes supported by the proper technology to improve the overall efficiency and scalability of the company while delivering bottom-line results.

Being a CIO at Diversified, what challenges and trends are you experiencing, and what measures are you taking to mitigate those?

One of the key challenges over the last five years is our speed of growth.  We have integrated twenty-two acquisitions.  Understanding that Diversified is an acquisition company and we are buying mature assets, we had to develop a strategy that provides scale, and a low technical cost of ownership.  So we established an IT strategy of safe, simple, and standard.   We drove this strategy with a 100% cloud platform and common systems approach we call OneDEC.  We built a scalable technology platform that is 100% cloud and supports all our common systems.  So we convert the acquired company to the OneDEC platform with every acquisition.  We have successfully converted 22 companies to the OneDEC platform.  This approach drives our scale, lowers cost, and executes our safe, simple, standard strategy.

"To drive change in an organization, hiring good and capable leaders is crucial to your success.  We would not be successful without a good team”.

We have successfully moved to 100% cloud for all applications.  The value of 100% cloud has exponentially paid off from a cyber security standpoint.  We are using Microsoft Azure as our cloud platform.  In addition, we are now utilizing MS Azure as a PaaS for the entire enterprise driving scale, automation, and standardization.

Are there any projects you've been working on, and what technological elements do you leverage to make them successful?

One of the key values of the common system approach is that it helps drive standard data definitions for our enterprise warehouse.   One of the significant challenges with all the acquisitions is how to standardize the data to develop a common language to drive organizational behavior.   By utilizing common systems and an enterprise warehouse, we can leverage that standard to create field-level analytics to improve operational production for the company.  We are developing a field analytics platform to provide better tools to put in the hands of employees making real-time decisions, our well tenders!  This project leverages our investment in several technologies, such as MS Azure.  We also have partnered with ATT/First Net to help with our LTE coverage and Fortinet to help with our field-level security.

The other strategy differentiating us is that when we started building the OneDEC platform, we partnered with a company to support our data warehouse.  We essentially have DMAAS (data management as a service). This approach has improved our speed and ability to drive data into the organization and handle the data transformation of 22 acquisitions.  The data warehouse approach allows our OneDEC platform to focus on the transactional systems because we now move our analytical data to the warehouse to drive safe, simple, standard data to the enterprise.

Would you like to share a piece of advice for your fellow peers so they can improve in the space?

I know everyone is struggling to get to the cloud.  That journey is hard and scary.   It takes courage, commitment, and discipline to make that decision and make it happen.  The real value is when you get to 100% cloud.  You will only get marginal value with a hybrid approach.  So the advice I would share is to hire excellent leaders who know how to drive change and adoption.  It is a significant paradigm shift in thinking and future solutions.  Once you are 100% software-defined and physical equipment and location are unnecessary, the opportunities are endless.