Technologies required to produce a revolution in the exploration and production business are available, but courageous vision and leadership are needed for action.

The need for an E&P decision-maker to know what data and information are necessary to make the best decisions has been clear for some time. To meet that need in a revolutionary way, focused and disciplined leadership must pull together available technologies and use them to alter the organization's way of managing its knowledge and decision-making process. The upshot is that many parts of E&P companies need to be realigned with the new technologies in order to move the revolution ahead.
The interpreter
To get a perspective of the decision-making revolution, look at the E&P environment through the eyes of different players, beginning with an interpreter. Starting the day's work at his Web-based information portal, his home page is configured to show all work requests and the status of jobs he had running overnight. Additionally, any data ordered has its projected delivery date shown and is associated with the project to which it will be loaded.
The interpreter can see quickly how many sessions are active and may have messages from worldwide collaborators arranged similarly to chat room message boards. Two are titled, "What do you think about this horizon interpretation?" and "Is this a single channel or two overlapping channels?" During the day or overnight, interpreters using the latest software delivered by an application service provider (ASP) can collaborate from any time zone, and the best interpreter's knowledge can be leveraged. For instance, the company's best deepwater channel facies interpreter could consult internally on dozens of projects. If other interpreters request his participation, he can connect and share access to their project to contribute to the interpretive process actively - without leaving his office.
Using ASP-served interpretation software opens other avenues, too. An interpreter equipped with a basic geological and geophysical interpretation software bundle that economically meets her needs most of the time may have occasional needs for "power tools" to understand the depositional environment. So using point-and-click menus, she might request 10-day access to the "power user" package from her ASP. Upon her manager's electronic approval, access to the additional software is immediately granted (and billed to her project), and in minutes the interpreter is using the additional software. Similarly, if the interpreter needs a single special-purpose tool or a new application that is not part of the ASP's bundled offerings, she requests it from a value-added software and services menu.
Another project is the further development of a production asset. With a reservoir simulation running remotely on a vendor's supercomputer, the vendor displays the simulation results directly on the interpreter's browser. If the interpreter wants to perform another simulation, she just changes a few parameters and resubmits the simulation job from the browser. The vendor's supercomputer runs the new simulation, sends notification when the job finishes and again delivers the results to the browser - with the interpreter never having to actually touch the data or baby-sit the machine.
When starting a project in a new area, she pulls up a list of wells, zones, production information and other data types available in the company's master data store. Then she clicks on a list of vendors offering additional information and their prices. More clicks show each vendor's history and the quality rating for that vendor's data, such as depth accuracy for well data (problems 30% of the time), on-time delivery (90% in the past 12 months) and any other factors relevant to the vendor's performance. Thanks to this information, the ultimate data consumer is well-equipped to deal directly with data vendors, all via the Web.
Managerial perspective
Back at the asset manager's desk, a message arrives on his PC. An interpreter has submitted a request to order data, with costs attached. The manager electronically approves the order or deletes some data elements he considers too expensive or inappropriate and approves the remaining order, which then goes to the vendor. The vendor ships the requested data to the E&P company's ASP vendor, who also provides services that rationalize it, clean it up, validate it and create the interpretation project. The interpreter then receives notification on his PC that the data has arrived and the project is ready.
For many companies, this process has many manual steps and often consumes weeks as various people attempt to determine what data exists, in whose possession and in what condition. Eventually data may be acquired only to find that it needs considerable cleanup to make it usable.
In contrast, with accurate knowledge about and easy access to E&P data, a steady stream of new projects can be created and loaded to data servers. Interpreters can spend their time interpreting more prospects per year instead of losing time and productivity to data management and project creation and administration issues. The technology to make this scenario possible is available. The challenge is integrating the technology into a comprehensive solution for all the decision-makers.
Top decision-maker level
Moving up the chain of command, this new technology environment gives all end users, including E&P managers and executives, better command of the critical information for individual, team and corporate success. With personalized access to validated information and analysis on their desktops, they can collaborate worldwide in the same digital space, from geology and geophysics to finance, economics and risk analysis. As needed, they have direct access to information in data sources as diverse as project databases, document stores, public and private information sources, data warehouses and ERP systems.
Essentially, information technology transforms business by bringing together data management, access to data analysis tools, document classification, group collaboration, business intelligence, executive information and the company intranet. The whole concept is about linking systems and subsystems to create an overall decision-support framework - on the desktop.
Empowerment
Typically, E&P companies can perform most of this integration with their financial data. What is new is the integration with the E&P data, which is essential since production is what turns hydrocarbons in the ground into revenue on the books. And easy access to all these data leads to a radically new (at least for the E&P industry) concept: empowerment.
In "early adopter" companies, asset managers or interpreters make many decisions. In less technologically sophisticated companies, these decisions are made at the business unit or corporate level. If the interpreter and the asset manager have access to information formerly only available to business unit or corporate decision-makers - and know how to use it - they should be able to make the decision.
At enlightened E&P companies, management sets the goals - for example, "become more productive by doubling reserves and doubling production in 5 years with no additional headcount." Then management acquires technology, puts systems and structures in place and allows people to make mistakes and learn from them, with monitoring systems in place to ensure that people are, in fact, learning. Over time, decision cycle times decrease and success rates increase, thanks to empowering the front-line employee.
Historically, interpreters have made recommendations, but have not been held accountable for the accuracy of their results. Maybe that should change, with interpreters being responsible for the accuracy of their predictions and their success rates. That would require asset teams to be more business-literate in order to make sound business decisions. At the same time, asset teams would function more like independent businesses, making decisions such as determining the most appropriate source of capital for developing their prospects and potentially making offers to farm out or trade prospects with others operating in their areas.
Change how business is done
To revolutionize business with technology, however, companies must change some of the ways they do business. Some companies have embraced some or all of the technologies discussed, and are seeing the productivity gains that can result.
It seems a company's year-to-year geoscientist productivity tends to remain within a range for most companies - unless the companies are actively using technology to become more productive. In other words, the average level of barrels of oil added per geoscientist may be inherent in a company's business model.
Many individuals have raised objections to the use of this average as a business metric. Perhaps the most common objection is that the area of the world in which a company chooses to operate may dominate this metric, by virtue of different probabilities of finding large discoveries. Perhaps so; we have observed that this factor can significantly affect any single year's results.
Making the revolution happen
To achieve the revolution, companies will need to understand and implement organizational realignment methods and technologies to ensure that the vision and business value are realized. For practical purposes, organizational realignment consists of five steps. Companies must develop a vision, define the technological and organizational architecture to achieve that vision, alter the workflow and business processes in line with the architecture, provide individual performance contracting and training, and institute disciplined program and project management to realize the sought-after value.
Program management is especially critical to fully realize business results. Originating in the military and the NASA environments years ago, the concept revolves around determining how to take a major change initiative and turn it into a program made up of a series of manageable projects. Available information technology can be revolutionary, but it will only be valuable if the adopting organization is realigned to allow that technology to be used on a day-to-day basis by the entire decision-making team.
How to start
How do companies proceed to the revolution? Senior managers must decide what they want and how badly they want it. Then they have to go after it decisively and actively. The rewards will follow: costs should drop dramatically, and the speed of making decisions and accomplishing tasks and projects should increase substantially.
New technology is focused on capturing data, information and knowledge and making it available at the right points in the decision-making process for peak performance.

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