The traditional triumvirate, people, processes and technology, is suffering growing pains. Getting the trio to pull together to achieve production enhancement goals calls for a visit to the doctor.

Around the worldwide oil and gas industry, there has been unprecedented interest in improving tactical and strategic decision-making. The reason is simple. The pace of the business has picked up - and not by just a little. As the world's largest business, reckoned at more than US $3.5 trillion, energy is the most highly valued and widely traded commodity in the world, and petroleum is its wheel-horse.

The industry recognizes it has a problem, and that problem is not going to go away. Demand, now more than 78 million b/d, is expected to surge to 95 million by 2010. At the same time, reserves are being depleted at record rates, while new discoveries are increasingly more difficult to find and produce. Explorationists tell us the age of the elephants has passed. New discoveries are smaller, more remote and require increasingly sophisticated technology to produce effectively. At the same time, most operators are re-evaluating their assets to see how judicious investments in technology or production techniques can add economic life to mature fields.

Time is the enemy. Companies find that it has become increasingly difficult to access all the data they need to support enterprise-critical decisions, turn the data into useful, relevant information, perform due diligence in evaluating alternatives and make the decision to go forward. One way they are seeking to bring efficiency to the decision-making process is by opening real-time decision centers. The centers are known by any number of names: decisionariums, visionariums, real-time operations centers, operations support centers and so on. They may be real, having the appearance of an electronic cave full of 3-D video displays, or virtual, existing in cyberspace, where decision makers are linked by the Internet. No matter the form or the name, they exist for one reason: to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the decision-making process.

In the classic sense, the challenge has always been to optimize the application of people, process and technology to benefit the enterprise. Today, new processes and technology are arriving faster than people can assimilate and evaluate them. As a famous philosopher of the 1950s liked to observe, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Today's decision centers are the knowledge machines that will enable companies to efficiently access, process, validate and correlate the information they need to run their businesses. The processes and technology are there, the oil industry just needs to know how to harness the human engine to them to maximize the return on the investment it has made.

Another famous observation, oft repeated these days, is, "We don't have to re-invent the wheel." Albeit trite, in this case the observation is particularly apropos. To provide a wheel for our engine, we can turn to another very large, high-tech industry, one much older than our own - the defense industry. Perhaps no place else are decisions so critical, so time-dependent and so impactful. Defense agencies and contractors know that incremental efficiencies in the abilities of humans to process data and make correct decisions can make the difference between success and disaster. How a modern fighter pilot can identify a potential target, determine its threat level, choose the appropriate weapons system and initiate target engagement, all the while flying his aircraft at Mach-2 and maneuvering to avoid hostile fire, is a mystery to most of us. In fact, the defense industry has invested years of work and billions of dollars refining the human-machine interface so life-or-death decisions of this sort can be made routinely by 25-year olds.

Can complex, decision-tree scenarios be made to operate more efficiently by taking a scientific approach? Examples abound. Recently, with government approval, a division of the UK Defence Ministry has undertaken to commercialize certain non-classified technologies and techniques and make them available to the public. We have formed a company to do this. Called QinetiQ, the company comprises more than 8,000 scientists representing a broad range of disciplines. Currently, they are working on about 50 projects for the exploration and production (E&P) sector. One of the most intriguing is the skill of building better teams by sharpening their decision-making tools. QinetiQ has quickly recognized that the thought-processes a drilling team leader goes through in successfully steering a well through extremely hostile environments to precisely hit the target are virtually the same as those used by the fighter pilot. Logistical decisions made by field development teams involve the same rationale employed by military commanders trying to ensure they have the capability to deliver the precise amount of ordnance at exactly the right time while keeping their troops fed, equipped and protected from countermeasures.

Harnessing the human engine to the knowledge management machine is the responsibility of QinetiQ's Centre for Human Sciences' Human Technology Integration Group. The center employs 300 professionals in a broad range of competencies who apply unique combinations of team training and interface design to develop powerful, intuitive decision-making capabilities; then assist in their implementation and introduction.

Among the services and technologies they provide are decision skills training, team training, leadership enhancement and team and organizational learning. Design enhancements include technology assessment and design and process redesign. QinetiQ professionals work with companies to help them identify and isolate decision-relevant information and apply it in efficient workflows that culminate in decisive action. Because humans have to interact with one another as well as the knowledge infrastructure, QinetiQ's scientists examine all aspects of cognitive and environmental context to ensure that situational information transfer takes place efficiently and unambiguously.

Dr. Simon Banbury, senior human factors consultant at the center, describes situational awareness as the key to control room interaction. "One of the ways we eliminate the feeling of being swamped with data is to give context-sensitive advice, automation and assistance," he said. "Another way is by a process we call 'data fusion.' This is when the data streams are fused together to try to reduce the amount of data actually coming through to the operator," he concluded. Banbury went on to explain that the danger of fusing data is that there is a risk of losing some transparency. The trick is keeping the level of data fusion enough to have a positive effect on the operator's workload without diluting his perception of what's going on.

With situational awareness, asset team members are provided with information needed to achieve a good understanding of their individual situations. They are also supported in understanding their team's situation. Such a "shared awareness" can be supported through careful design of the interface, communication protocols and team structure. This allows workers to focus on specific operational decisions, while maintaining an appreciation for how their decisions affect the project. According to Banbury, the highest form of situational awareness is the ability to anticipate and think ahead. It allows you to think proactively, putting a "safety buffer" around yourself, always staying ahead of the curve. Those with good situational awareness have the capacity to deal with routine and non-routine tasks more efficiently. "We facilitate situational awareness through interface design, training and simulation," Banbury explained. "Control room activity has been jokingly defined as several hours of sheer boredom punctuated by several minutes of pure panic. One of our roles is to devise realistic training simulations that workers can use during slack-time to hone their skills against the time when a real situation surfaces," he said. "We do it for pilots - we can do it for anyone."

"In actual practice, it goes much deeper than that," Banbury continued. "We develop verbal and visual cues that keep operators focused and informed. These are designed to elicit certain responses. If the appropriate response is not given, automatic alarms alert the staff before the situation degrades. If these are ignored, the system can intervene if necessary." The cues are carefully designed to overcome cultural and cognitive differences that may exist in the workforce so multinational and/or multidisciplinary teams can work efficiently. At the same time, drill-down capability is offered so workers or supervisors can examine the foundation of any decision in detail.

But often, oilfield workflows are comprised of elements or events with differing frequencies and implications. Banbury said, "We have a solution for that. We monitor routine tasks and only intervene when we detect that the operator's workload is excessive. We call this 'adaptive automation'." Banbury is very interested in the aspect of fatigue that comes into play in the oil industry. He and his colleagues at QinetiQ believe they can apply techniques learned in the military to solve this problem. He described the method they use to ensure that airport security screeners remain just as alert when inspecting the last bag on their shift as the first. "The techniques we use can be applied pretty much anywhere, and we've proved it works," he said.

QinetiQ has already been applying its technology and techniques in the oil and gas sector, BP has asked, "How can we get people to change the way they do things without waiting for an entire generation to retire?" Our solution can be the answer. Many majors are still developing fields the old-fashioned way. They have extremely long cycle-times, years in many cases, largely because it takes so long to acquire, process and evaluate the information they need for the next decision. Managing oil fields of the future is going to require day-to-day decisions. Those who lag lose.

QinetiQ realizes that Rome wasn't built in a day. We envision implementation of our techniques through a series of highly-focused pilot projects, maybe in less critical areas, until the advantages of improving the human-machine interface can be documented and quantified. QinetiQ envisages establishing collegial relationships with our clients, where we provide mentoring expertise embedded within the project that will help them assimilate the techniques. Our methods are proven to be effective where it really counts. The idea of transitioning from military to industrial application will help E&P operators, service companies and software providers enhance system design, optimize the human-machine interface, foster teamwork and greatly improve the decision-making process.

For more information, visit www.QinetiQ.com

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