ExxonMobil, the $515 billion oil and gas supermajor, says a reorganised information technology function has “opened up a lot of white space.”
Announcing its second highest Q2 earnings in a decade this week ($9.2 billion), CEO Darren Woods highlighted work the company has done since 2022 to fundamentally overhaul its operational structure, including IT.
ExxonMobil previously had heavily stove-piped functions, he said.
New centralised service delivery groups were paying off, Woods added.
That work has included the 2023 creation of a new Central Data Office that moved ExxonMobil’s data team away from corporate IT. (The office and its CDO now report to its Global Business Solutions division.)
“One of the advantages of the restructuring that we've done is we no longer identify our business with the products that we're making.
“[We previously] had a fuels marketing organization that was marketing fuels, and we had a chemical company that's marketing chemicals.
“We've now combined all that into a Product Solutions organisation, supported by a technology organisation…organised around core technical capabilities to deliver value to the businesses that they support. “
“A technology organisation that's very focused on applying core technology capabilities to business challenges and business opportunities… is starting to unlock applications that, frankly, in the past wouldn't have been identified because they didn't fit in the context of the organisations that we had in place. Today, the aperture is much broader and the playing field is much bigger” ExxoMobil’s CEO told analysts.
The company has made $10.7 billion in structural cost savings since 2019 and is on track to deliver $5 billion through the end of 2027 versus 2023.
Among its IT priorities include several major ERP migrations.
The company is recruiting widely across IT roles globally, from data scientists to IT monitoring specialists and DevOps “secrets engineers” (integrating “secrets infrastructure with various technologies such as Service Now, Kubernetes, Sail Point or other top IDM solutions” across its Global Business Centers, from Budapest to Bengaluru and Buenos Aires.
