ONGC director (technical) RC Gourh said the corporation had enormous knowledge and information on the fields and information technology. It could exploit these capabilities for development of oil fields and exploration.

The IT subsidiary could help ONGC become a world technology leader in the oil industry and earn foreign exchange through technical tie-ups with international firms.

The money earned could be used for import of petroleum products in future. "We need about 150 million tonne of oils and 250 million cubic metres of gas in the next five years as against the expected production of 40 million tonnes of oil," Gourh said.

While the corporation was gearing up to have increasing number of joint venture projects abroad for oil exploration and transport, it had drawnup a long-term programme to deal with data management and the speed of adaptability to derive maximum advantage from the ever changing IT tools in every sphere of operations, he said.

The oil industry in the country, and ONGC in particular, provides tremendous opportunity for development of IT business for upstream operations such as development of software packages for seismic data processing.

Gourh said at present the biggest "data problem" of oil companies was in finding the data they had and in knowing exactly what they had found. As data volumes increase, companies will need more resources in making sure that the best and most complete data sets were available quickly to retain their competitive advantage with the best tools for analysis, he added.

Citing the example of gaining benefits from IT in the oil industry, he said ONGC recently bagged an international drilling contract in Bangladesh at 40 per cent less costs than the bidding prices offered by international firms. The contract was for twoyears to develop three oil fields. Similar opportunities through joint ventures were in the offing in countries of the ertswhile Soviet Union and Gulf region.

Gourh said the IT subsidiary of ONGC would depend on input sources from outside the oil industry such as IT companies, oil field services firms and the defence industry to go for innovation in oil business. Today, the oil companies were doing less research and development of their own while spending increasingly on collaborative projects in specific areas.

Currently, all major business functions of ONGC like materials management, finance, human resources were going online. The integrated communication network to act as the backbone and support these enterprise-wide system had been planned to be in place by December this year, he added.