Roy Irvine is a qualified Geologist who has worked within the De Beers Group for over 25 years. During this time he has been involved in many of the processes within the diamond pipeline, from initial sampling of a prospective area, through to the evaluation of deposits using both drilling and open cast sampling techniques and the geological control of mining operations in both alluvial and kimberlite mines, as well as the use of Technical Systems within Exploration.

Roy's interest in Enterprise Architecture started with the realisation that this was an excellent mechanism to capture intrinsic and tacit knowledge about how De Beers, in particular Exploration, should be operating to maximise efficiencies. Within Exploration, project managers are now using the Enterprise Architecture models as part of the planning and operational aspects of their work thereby ensuring that the models themselves continue to add value through repeated re-use and improvement.

Presentation
Selection of, Deployment, and Support of a Global Drilling Information Management solution using Enterprise Architecture Principles
De Beers are the world s largest producers of rough diamonds to the diamond trade, supplying over 40% of the annual requirements. The diamond pipeline, from Exploration though Mining, Sorting, Cutting and Polishing to Retail is a long and complex one and one in which a clear understanding of each part of the pipeline is paramount, to ensure that De Beers remain the most important players in the diamond industry into the future. One of the recent changes that De Beers has undergone is the adoption of standardised technical solutions across the various operating companies, which has resulted in demonstrated savings in terms of e.g. shorter decision making time, more effective use of expertise worldwide and reduced software development costs amongst many others.

This paper will describe the work that was undertaken in 2004 / 2005 in identifying the high level functions required for a Drilling Information Management solution to be deployed globally across Exploration. The keystone of the process was the use of Enterprise Architecture principles to clearly define the Process, People, Data and Geographic diversity in deploying such a solution. It will cover the initial market survey, the selection of the most relevant vendors and the evaluation of their offerings and finally the selection of one vendor, Datamine. It will also cover the development of the various types of models and demonstrate how the Datamine application can be customized to enable each project just to capture what is required at that stage in the pipeline. The presentation will also show how the natural flexibility of an Exploration drilling campaign e.g. change in order of processes can be scoped up front before the project start, so that training programmes can be tailored per campaign. The presentation will conclude by demonstrating how the models can be the cornerstone of a QA/QC process to ensure that both the actual process and the data captured in the models remain consistent and that the outcome of the campaign can be evaluated to ensure that it has met the objectives of the campaign.

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