Craig Hayman wants to get everyone on board for the digitalisation journey.

The chief executive of software giant Aveva says the digitalisation of the oil and gas industry has to be a joint learning experience that leaves no one behind.

Digital transformation has been on the industry's agenda for years but the Covid-19 pandemic has increased the speed at which companies are using technology to become better and more efficient, he says.

Hayman grew up in the UK, near beach-side Brighton on England's south coast.

His first job as a 16-year-old was working at a petrol station near his home, ringing up transactions on the till.

His father served in the Royal Air Force before putting himself through night school to become an engineer, while his mother was a receptionist who got Hayman the job at the petrol station, where she also worked.

But Hayman’s passion was software. “I’ve always liked it and knew it was what I wanted to do for work. I liked the idea of embedded software that could control things,” he says.

Hayman moved to the US in his early 20s and spent 15 years with IBM, where he was exposed to the ups and downs of working for a software giant.

“I did well and benefited from a lot of rotations — got exposure to sales, mergers and acquisitions. I learned so much,” he says. But, “probably the hardest thing was working in a company with over 150,000 people that you don’t get to know as much as you might want to”.

By 2014, Hayman wanted a change and started looking at the industries that would be going though digitalisation next.

He moved on to a role with eBay as president of enterprise business, at a time when the retail sector was undergoing a transformation with the implementation of digital technologies.

Digitalisation adventure

His next career move would take him back to his roots — to living in the UK for the first time in more than 30 years, and to the industry that gave him his first paycheck as a teenager.

Oil and gas businesses were next to embark on a digitalisation adventure.

“The first 90 days in any job is a wonderful time," Hayman says. "You can ask a lot of questions."

Aveva had around 500 employees "and I met around 75% of them," he says. "There were many conversations to find out what the role of the company should be.”

One challenge then and now is meeting multiple expectations.

“We want to serve our customers, shareholders and our employees. You don't get to pick one over the other,” he says.

“Two years ago, many oil and gas majors, midstream and integrated companies were getting educated about digitalisation, and began talking about it, about the digital twin, about Oil & Gas 4.0. They began trying it on like a jacket and probably said ‘I think we can do this’,” Hayman says.

“But now that they’ve already run some digital transformation projects, they want to go faster. It’s where we are now in oil and gas — we have all these digital technologies, but they are not at scale yet.”

While companies are always driven by results, Hayman says culture should also play an important role.

“In an oil and gas environment, safety is unbelievably important — but you also have to make sure people feel safe and secure in their jobs. You have to give them opportunities to learn and grow,” he says.

Squeezing the workforce

As the industry increases its use of digital technologies, concerns have been raised over job cuts.

“When you can’t get any more improvements though digital technologies, you focus on squeezing the workforce, and all industries go through this, like retail did a few years back," he says.

Oil and gas may lag other industries somewhat in digitalisation but there is no reason to believe massive displacement is inevitable, Hayman says.

“My view is for Aveva to focus on digitalisation that can help workers do a better job, not on removing labour,” he says.

Digitalisation is hardly the only force transforming industry jobs — in the aftershock of the Covid-19 pandemic, many companies have had to adapt, including Hayman's.

“We always tell our customers to be more digital, but we never expected us to have to be more digital. I don’t think we appreciated just how digital we had to become,” he says.

In late March, Aveva moved into a work-from-home mode.

“I think like everywhere, we saw our productivity impacted at first, while we helped everyone get set up to work from home. But then productivity increased, and it works very well now,” he says.

Much of the company’s attention is on supporting their employees though the changes, focusing on their mental wellbeing in a stressful time.

The same curiosity that led Hayman to software early on still informs his approach to life.

He says the best advice he can give is to “ask questions, be curious, learn”.

“It’s ok to say you don’t know — it shows a level of confidence when you ask a question and people feel good when they give you the answer.”

Field Development

'I don’t think we appreciated just how digital we had to become' - Aveva's Hayman helps businesses get up to speed