The petroleum industry includes the global processes of exploration, extraction, refining, transporting, usually by oil tankers and pipelines, and marketing products.
Here, the “integrated operations” (IO) refers to new work processes and ways of performing oil and gas exploration and production, which has been facilitated by new information and communication technology (ICT), often used as an extended synonym for information technology (IT), but is usually a more general term that stresses the role of unified communications and the integration of telecommunications (telephone lines and wireless signals), computers, middleware as well as necessary software, storage- and audio-visual systems, which enable users to create, access, store, transmit, and manipulate