Workplace portals maximize team efficiency and effectiveness.

Portal technology recently has attracted increased attention from the computer trade publications. In fact, one information technology publisher just launched a magazine devoted exclusively to portals. There are those of us who believe portals are useful for corporations with far-flung operations, but we are not trying to start the next information technology religious revival. More people know what we're talking about now, but there's also greater concern that portals are the next target for e-business hype.
The workspace portal integrates in a single online interface all the resources employees require to optimize performance.

Portals first came on the scene years ago as generic communications channels and knowledge management tools, sometimes as a replacement for corporate intranets. Now they have advanced to help companies boost workplace performance and link that performance to business value by integrating all the tools, assets and applications employees need to do their jobs more effectively.

Portals bring together traditionally siloed initiatives such as: content management, knowledge management, information personalization and enterprise application integration. They provide a shared area where ideas can be exchanged and discussed.

At their best, portals simulate the ideal of what we all experienced years ago when our work revolved around our upstream colleagues instead of our laptops, and most of our discussions were carried out with people close by. In those days, we contributed in a more structured, contained world, a network of offices radiating off a central hall. Each office often contained an individual with a unit of knowledge contributing to the company's quest for solutions. Proximity played a very large role in achieving overall success. As in real estate, it was about location.

Developments in collaborative technology have brought us to the threshold of a greater (virtual) proximity to more resources, natural, informational and human. Increased business value has flowed from these advances.

The world's oil and gas companies are finding that many advances in information technology now help them work more efficiently and in ways never before imagined.

Yet time may be running out to take full advantage of this new technology.

Just as intervening years changed the office - promotions, transfers and the relentless downsizing- so, too, does the dispersal of information today endanger the viability of the oil and gas industry's most valuable resource: institutional knowledge.

It is a byproduct of our industry's business model and the way we work today. The industry today has more assets than it can optimize with current professionals, as well as existing processes and technologies.

We know our oil and natural gas exploration and production business is a $150 billion industry; and the last 10-year thrust of technical advances in geophysical surveying, drilling, data visualization and decision support systems have helped to lower costs and improve efficiency.

Yet we also know that our organizations continually need to find more ways to wring out efficiency and create greater business value. In the future we may have even fewer technical professionals, therefore companies will need more productivity per person.

Therefore, we must change the technologies and the processes we use to manage assets to be successful in the future. To stanch the flow of knowledge, companies must take aggressive steps to manage data and knowledge effectively. One valuable way to do so will be to embrace portal technologies.

Many of today's exploration and production operational processes lack the necessary ingredients to seize upon portals' synergistic efficiencies. Look, for example, at joint venture (JV) wells.

Today, we have large volumes of data feeding from JV wells along separate conduits back to the individual owners. As companies stress independence - as opposed to interdependence - inefficiency reigns, costs rise and redundant basic analysis is carried out over and over again. In addition, internal scheduling and process complexities can make it difficult to stay on the same page even amongst internal asset teams and their support personnel. Overall personal productivity is far from optimal.
New technology can - and must - change this way of thinking and working.

Like their counterparts in other industries, oil and gas companies are discovering in portal solutions a range of previously unattainable benefits. From a single Web site, employees and partners can have easy electronic access to an abundance of data and services. This new technology has created a better solution for sharing knowledge, fostering collaboration and improving productivity. Not only can participants contribute to a particular project from a remote location, but they also can clearly view all relevant information and can easily synchronize with other team members. Portal technology may put an end to common industry problems: such as multiple versions of constantly changing rig schedules, wasted time spent searching for data and decisions based on inaccurate information.

The upside is likely to be dramatic. Huber and Mills' Manhattan Institute study demonstrates that, efficient though they are, new technologies in energy don't reduce demand for energy, "they expand it." And they don't exhaust supply, "they expand it more."

Portal technologies are designed to stimulate similar efficiencies - and savings:
• improved individual efficiency - reduced time spent searching for data by up to 60%;
• increased team effectiveness - by using common data sets, wasted work is diminished;
• improved team focus - portal technology is designed to assist in the use of common processes, which align resource teams to the wide scale project and business vision;
• cost savings - companies can save millions of dollars, and portal technology can deliver up to 15% reduction in cycle time during the well planning process; and
• greater compliance - once implemented, the portal promotes conformity to a proven practice.

Imagine an asset team prospecting in the Niger Delta. Utilizing today's Internet/intranet technologies, that "team" may be comprised of several reservoir specialists in Houston, a few drilling engineers working from London, and just a handful of onsite geologists.

We used to convene in face-to-face afternoon meetings to share the day's ideas or a particular nugget from our analyses. Today's upstream professionals hit the Internet/intranet whenever they like, downloading data from the Houston headquarters, sharing ideas via Web-based workspace portals, streaming real-time data direct from the Benue Trough, and so on, stimulating a digital brainstorm of productivity.

These information-sharing platforms not only make for terrific time savings but also help limit the possibility for research duplication, as team members around the world are able to share their data and findings with others in real time, in effect, dividing and conquering, digitally.

Yet for all the technological advances and benefits we are beginning to see, we face perhaps the greatest hurdle in overcoming a fundamental issue in E&P.

For the most part, we are a group of highly intelligent professionals who are often highly resistant to change!

While the upstream business is one of the most technology-driven industries, an historic problem has been that people don't, won't or can't use new technology rapidly when it is introduced. In our highly demanding, results-now, operational environment, it's natural for people to cling to the known quantity: today's tools.

Workspace portal technology is no different, and for all the benefits it offers as a work tool, it will fail to have an impact unless those using them feel they are an active part of the evolution.

There are a number of key steps to help facilitate this occurrence.

Perhaps the most important factor is that management must take the time to prepare their people for change. Management can lead a horse (aka engineer) to water but it can't mandate technology into use. Its introduction must be administered in a careful, methodical context.

First, portal developers must understand present processes and prioritize improvement opportunities enabling beta users' to recognize near term improvements.

Next, developers need to design a Web-enabled process model and portal functionality that best suits the geological, geophysical and engineering professionals' portions of the business process including required workflow, applications and data.

Third, address the human impact. Management needs to genuinely think through, understand and above all communicate the benefits any new system offers to the individual workers affected. Employees' natural suspicions are that new technology is about reducing costs, which in turn is about needing fewer employees. The key is communication and enrollment. Management must deliver consistent, credible and frequent messages and invite feedback and show responsiveness to employees' concerns. Ultimately, the user must totally own the approach to produce the benefits.

Fourth, companies must confirm the metrics measurement and the tools. There must be a clear, definable business practice understanding of the gains any new technology and approach can yield.
Fifth, build and test portal functionality, so that once employees have opted-in, they have a system that is functional, addresses their needs with tools required for them to do the best job possible.
Sixth, prepare the users, so that, as the system is ready, so are your users. Prepare them for what to expect, and if program requirements have changed the parameters of the software since the initiation of the new campaign, explain why.

Seventh, conduct the pilot, then assess your results, respond to critiques and make changes where they are required.

Finally, scale-up. If management has prepared employees and those same employees feel as if they have a stake in these new tools, the likelihood is that they will give it a fair enough shot to begin to see actual benefits.

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