The petroleum exploration industry has spent the last few years preparing for the brain drain that is already under way and is expected to worsen in the near future as a generation of highly experienced engineers and earth scientists retire. At least it thinks it's been preparing.

The industry has delayed the negative impact of its historical hiring and firing cycles by dipping into the pool of experienced engineers and geoscientists available because of forced attrition to supplement the smaller numbers of seasoned professionals they've retained. In reality, however, the hiring and firing cycles will inevitably drain companies of their hard-won experiential knowledge and, thus, their corporate wisdom. The result will be capital inefficiency at best; company demise at worst.

The industry is too focused on amassing information under the banner of "knowledge management" and not enough on how to use that information. Information by itself is not the answer to the exploration industry's impending problem. Capturing the best practices, the decision-making processes and the insights that make that information valuable is the key to meaningful knowledge management in the oil and gas exploration industry.

If the industry is going to successfully capture the experience poised to walk out its collective door, it needs a new mindset when it comes to knowledge management. That mindset must be formed around the concept of preserving wisdom instead of amassing information. Companies often don't need more data; they simply need to capture and share hard-won wisdom from a variety of domains and disciplines. British Petroleum has hired back a number of its former E&P professionals on a consulting basis. Shell and ExxonMobil have quietly been hiring experienced professionals. That practice suggests they recognize these veterans alone possess the kind of in-depth know-how that cannot be taught, transferred, purchased, or paid for with anything short of years of experience on the job.

Until fairly recently, entry-level engineers and earth scientists were trained in the "classical" mode that combined their technical education with apprenticeships in a mentoring environment; the transfer of technical best practices and corporate experience - that is to say, the company's wisdom - was implicit.
With downsizing and overhead reduction, that transfer of wisdom has either atrophied or disappeared altogether. How, then, can a company retain and disseminate knowledge and wisdom acquired over time?

A new generation of knowledge management technology captures the wisdom and guides companies toward more profitable ventures by capturing the decision-making process. This new class of technology does not just record which data sets a team used when it considered whether to buy a lease in a given area. It will document why those sets were chosen, the scientific questions asked, and what each team member's thoughts were throughout the process. They capture the progression from one analysis to the next. The best of them let users drill down into each decision through hot links that reveal the logic that led to successful drilling and leasing decisions. They also enable a team member to easily drop the entire decision-making chain into publishing software for immediate distribution.

When I was at Anadarko Petroleum Corp. in 1998, we began deploying a data mining/visualization technology developed that enabled us to do the kind of knowledge management that would preserve our wisdom. The current generation of that technology integrates the abilities to access databases, capture best practices, perform statistical analyses, archive and publish. Collaborating electronically, we could explain our rationale in writing at every step of the process, preserving the wisdom that made our knowledge work for us.

Carefully considered knowledge management and mentoring programs, supported by the appropriate technology, offer the industry's best bet to ride out the brain drain and develop the next generation of engineers and geoscientists.

Ron Bain is a Houston-based consultant with 30 years of experience in the energy industry.

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