An organization's most valuable asset can easily deteriorate. Is there anything you can do to stop it?

Knowledge management. The first time you spot this expression out of the corner of your eye, it would be understandable to assume that it is overwrought consultant-speak for something as mundane as keeping your database of prospect phone numbers up to date.
At one level, it may be, and anyone who has been exposed to (some would say "victimized by") applied management theories could be cynical about this one. But knowledge management is the real deal, not a fuzzy theory. It's in practice - at a high level of sophistication in some organizations - and it can function with elegance enough to warm the heart of even engineers with a fondness for five decimal places.
Knowledge management is a rapidly growing discipline that intends to capture and preserve an organization's most valuable asset. With apologies to the author of the 1981 book with a similar title, an organization's knowledge is truly the "soul of the machine." You may be thinking, Who doesn't want to preserve this asset? Everyone would like to, of course, but the practice is not ubiquitous.
Not yet, anyway. But that will change. As with any hot topic, the resource base is growing fast (do a search), so there is no shortage of tools that organizations can employ to go about it. In our industry, successful implementations by early adopters will guide others. At one major oilfield service company, such an implementation was demonstrated recently that seemed, to some observers, to benchmark the process. Essentially, this company "Googlized" its knowledge, data and experience.
The result is remarkable. Imagine that you have to solve a problem for a customer that has occurred during drilling operations. Imagine also that you are hundreds of miles away in a remote support location. Someone in your company may have encountered this problem before and may have solved it successfully, but that is of little use if you didn't know or can't get access to this information.
With knowledge management, you can. You go to your company's intranet. There's a place to search for similar problems or situations, extensively categorized. Because of your company's long experience, you turn up descriptions of similar problems, the solutions tried and their results. The solutions offered are not just speculation or guesses, either. They have been peer reviewed within the organization before being made available.
You find the solution that works best. But let's say you still have some questions. You go to an internal discussion forum topic that covers your situation. This forum (and the others) also beneficially creates a searchable record of everything said on the subject. Technical papers and other documents are available, also extensively categorized and searchable.
This is an incomplete sketch of one company's real-life implementation, but it gives an idea of what's possible. For oilfield operating and service companies in particular, with extremely complex, rapidly evolving technology and experience, knowledge management is essential to maximizing the value of their most important asset and biggest market differentiator.
Other, more limited processes can be thought of as knowledge management. Collaboration software for such tasks as managing production operations is one example. And that's great as far as it goes. But eventually, high-technology organizations will want to capture all of its knowledge and experience before those assets walk out the door. It's interesting to note that complaints heard about such things as operational issues often can be thought of as deficiencies in knowledge management.
If knowledge management makes you look hard at your loosely organized collection of internal documents and think, I can do better than this, then you have made a start to a healthy organizational memory that can serve up all of your unique intellectual property, anytime, anywhere, now and in the future. That's an asset that only your organization can have.
Brownfields become evergreen?
During the Hart Energy conference in Denver entitled "Brownfields: Optimizing Mature Assets," a participant suggested that the term "brownfields" is inappropriate because of its negative environmental connotation. As the conference made clear, "evergreen" may be closer to the mark for describing the large challenge and opportunity confronting the industry. With more than 50% of proven reserves still in the ground, mature reservoirs remain the greatest potential source of hydrocarbons and will contribute much more of the world's production volume for the foreseeable future than new discoveries.
Development of fit-for-purpose technology is the key, and an array of promising tools and techniques is under development. Underbalanced and managed-pressure drilling, water management, stimulation, seismic and digital information tools are only a few of the areas in which new technology is appearing that will quicken the pace of production from mature fields.
You'll be reading about brownfields development on a regular basis in this magazine. Mature fields are the industry's storied past, and while brownfields may not be evergreen exactly - nothing lasts forever - they will also be a very large part of its exciting future.

Comments