The COO’s new agenda: Future-proofing oil & gas and chemicals assets

Amid changes, leading COOs adopt a mind shift to become transformation architects to drive better execution, performance and resilience.

In brief

• Energy and chemicals COOs, as well as business unit and asset leaders, face more responsibility than ever before.
• The integration of technology, workforce, process and ecosystem is critical to building resilient assets and maintaining long-term performance.
• To focus on these priorities, COOs must lead enterprise transformation to establish the central anchor of operations throughout the transformation.

In today’s fast-evolving energy landscape, the responsibilities of operations leaders have become more complex. They are still expected to both deliver results today and create resilience for the future, while adhering to the traditional mandates of safety, efficiency, cost control, reliability and workforce management. But those leading chief operating officers (COOs) recognize that the way to achieve all these objectives is through transformation across the enterprise, and that success often entails engaging a complex ecosystem of internal and external partners and center these efforts on a common purpose.

Transformational COOs empower success by addressing four critical questions:

1. Do we have a vision for the future and is it clearly articulated, understood and agreed upon?

Transformative COOs have a clear picture of the future of their businesses, developed in concert with internal and external resources who help them visualize where the industry is headed; how their organizations need to evolve in the global construct; and what tools, systems and processes are available to support that evolution.

Just as important, they frequently share that vision and encourage both their employees and their ecosystem partners to understand their individual roles; but COOs also are given and recognize opportunities to co-innovate. They champion the notion that through collaboration, the full collective experience and knowledge of the value chain is brought to bear on the company’s challenges and they place a primary emphasis on how best to team for execution and innovation. 

These COOs proactively close the communication gap so that their vision, on both what future operations will look like and how best to go about achieving them, is disseminated widely, clearly and frequently to create organizational alignment, both inside operations and across support functions. 

Developing and communicating a clear vision is key to leading transformation — driving needed change toward a common goal rather than reacting to what others want to do.

2. Are we prioritizing initiatives that will have a real impact and are we pursuing continuous improvement or approaches that will create a step change in performance?

When operations do not lead, improvement is often measured simply by improved cost performance in technology, procurement, supply chain, logistics, finance, accounting, human resources, etc. But these types of improvements do not necessarily translate into material, or even measurable, improvements in performance. It sounds obvious, but one of the major impediments to more successful transformation initiatives is that business units do not clearly communicate to staff functions what changes in approach would be of the greatest benefit to the business. This happens often in organizations where operations leaders don’t take the lead.

Proactively engaging with the ecosystem and clearly spelling out where the pain points are — and the help needed to solve them — is a key transformative responsibility for today’s COOs. To prioritize business drivers, COOs must take a direct approach with other leaders: “We need to profitably produce these volumes and to do that we need these capabilities. How can you help?”

When the COO is influencing or leading what support functions are working on and how they engage with operations, the result is more focused, more meaningful change that reflects what the business truly needs to drive long-term value.

3. Does our team have the necessary capability, capacity and mindset to drive change?

In the last wave of digital transformation, many companies stood up asset-embedded digital teams — tasked with enabling agile problem-solving close to the front line. These teams played a critical role in delivering value on the ground. But future-proofing the organization demands more.

Operations leaders must continue working to bring these teams closer to the front line but also strive to build a stronger bridge to enterprise priorities and platforms. The talent model must evolve, too. COOs need digital athletes: people who understand not only the “sensor-to-insight” journey but also the full landscape of operational capabilities — supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), measurement, production accounting, work management, maintenance and reliability, surveillance and optimization, real-time/autonomous operations and emerging technology.

Equally important, these teams must include business innovators who can engage the external ecosystem and explore new business models that drive resilience, flexibility and margin.

Currently, less than 30% of companies that have taken EY surveys have formalized this type of hybrid team structure at the asset level. Yet those who have, report faster deployment cycles, higher adoption and clearer ROI from transformation initiatives.

The COO must ask: Is my digital team future-fit? Are they connected strongly enough to enterprise strategy and embedded deeply enough into operations?

4. Are we utilizing the full ecosystem to fuel greater impact?

Another critical transformational element is connectivity — maintaining that operations are connected properly with one another, with other functions, such as global centers and offshore teams and with key external ecosystem partners.

For example, oil and gas companies often find that their subsurface and surface teams are still operating in silos — limiting optimization opportunities across the full hydrocarbon system. But as basins mature and margins tighten, the ability to synchronize subsurface insight with surface constraints becomes a defining capability.

COOs can unlock transformative value by driving tighter integration across disciplines, verifying that reservoir decisions, facility design, production optimization and flow assurance are coordinated in real time. This enables better recovery, faster root-cause resolution and smarter trade-offs across energy efficiency, throughput and equipment reliability.

Identifying ways to extract value from global centers and offshore teams can be another key element in providing resources for future proofing. Many operators established global capability centers or offshore hubs as cost-saving capacity plays. But leading organizations are now elevating these centers into strategic value generators — building digital, engineering and analytics capabilities that enable scale, speed and specialization.

Transformative COOs are working with enterprise leaders to redefine the mission of these centers. Instead of simply supporting transactional workflows, they can be empowered to own high-impact functions, including data engineering, emissions optimization, production surveillance or digital twin maintenance and even facility maintenance, workovers and turnarounds. This shift requires investment in skills, governance and change management, but it unlocks a scalable workforce model that can power operations 24/7, deliver consistent global standards and reduce the burden on field teams.

In addition to looking across the internal ecosystem, operations should consider external teams/contractors to support the transformation as well. For example, oilfield service and equipment companies (OFSEs), engineering, procurement and construction firms (EPCs) and capital project delivery teams hold significant influence over asset performance. But too often, they operate at arm’s length from day-to-day operations. That disconnect can delay transformation, fragment accountability and limit innovation at scale.

COOs must proactively reshape these relationships — engaging ecosystem partners as co-owners of performance. This includes codeveloping shared KPIs, integrating real-time data across project-to-operations handoffs and establishing joint innovation pipelines to accelerate technology deployment and value realization.

Digital engineering innovation should be central to this collaboration. That means involving OFSEs and EPCs not just in project execution, but in the co-design of digital twins, data architectures, automation strategies and artificial intelligence (AI) agents tailored to specific operational challenges. A more open innovation model can unlock faster solution development, better integration of operational technology (OT) with information technology (IT) and stronger return on capital for both brownfield optimization and greenfield design.

Where capital projects and operations align early, EY professionals have seen smoother commissioning, faster time-to-rate and better long-term uptime. Where OFSEs are treated as collaborators rather than vendors, uptime gains and cost reductions are more durable.

Proactive approach to future proofing delivers value

To be successful, transformation must be operationally led and strategically aligned — grounded in what drives performance at the asset level.

A transformation of operations is complex, but the requirements for COOs are clear: set a vision for the asset, align metrics of success to operations performance and invite the ecosystem to collaborate on better solutions.

These steps, combined with modeling a mind shift that encourages suggestions from a wide variety of perspectives reflecting differentiated experiences, leads to an ownership of change and drives greater buy-in, higher levels of value creation and faster and more thorough implementation of new tools and systems — leading to stronger, more resilient, more future-proof organizations.