As part of a ‘ModerniseIT’ agenda across BP, the oil and gas giant has embarked on a digital transformation journey designed to transform how the organisation works across tools, processes, vendors and people.

The main reason, according to Kurt Bergmans as Head of Global IT Service Operations, is to disrupt traditional business models to meet new global energy transition objectives.

Specific to Malaysia, the business adopted a “cloud-first” approach and identified 14 platforms in the company’s Technical Reference Model to be made available for employees. This can be used “by anyone” within BP to build new solutions, across platforms such as ServiceNow, Salesforce and Office 365.

The organisation has also embarked on a “thorough review” of all core IT processes to ensure they are “simplified, standardised, and if possible, automated”.

Within this change, BP also changed contracts with key suppliers to become partners, working in ‘squads’ alongside BP employees in an agile and DevOps focused manner. The aim, according to Bergmans, is to deliver new solutions to the business at pace.

In recognising the importance of people as BP’s “most important assets”, BP is promoting a culture of “continuous learning” in which all employees receive foundation training in key competencies such as cloud engineering, mobile app development and big data analytics, alongside agile, DevOps and customer design thinking.

Beside technical skills, the business is also promoting soft skills such as diversity and inclusion, values and behaviours, emotional intelligence and team collaboration, as well as building leadership attributes in the digital age.

For Bergmans, the wide-scale transformation - in Malaysia and further afield - highlights that BP is “no longer” an oil and gas or energy company, rather a “technology company”.