I am headed off to the SPE/IADC Drilling Conference tomorrow. I can’t remember missing many in the last 2 decades. It is a compact and focused conference and, as an old drilling hand, one I really enjoy.

There are drawbacks, of course, but they are mainly mine. I know I will see another round of new, shiny and really progressive technology. That will lead me to the conclusion that I would probably need a lot of schooling to get back into the business. That, in turn, will probably lead me to wax nostalgic with the “mature” crowd about the old days, although I really do believe that current technology and operations are miles ahead in efficiency, productivity and, most importantly, safety. We will probably talk about the art of throwing wraps with spinning chains, omitting thoughts about the fingers it cost. Maybe I will mention my old, long-gone friend Dick Black, who claimed he could climb the sand line, hand over hand, to the water table of a fourbles rig. We will probably hoist a couple and toast the way it was. Then I will get back to the business at hand — trying to figure out where all this is taking us and how far along we are on the journey.

I am firmly convinced, as I think most of you are, that our goal is totally integrated intelligent operations. That is not hard to figure out. But where we are in that journey is a monster question. Ask six people and you will get six different answers. Ask me and this is the answer you will get.

I believe we are closer than many think in regard to having most of the technology to pull this off. But we are a long way from the single focus required to integrate this technology industry-wide into a workable, valuable intelligent energy system. I look at it this way. There is the hard side. That is the technology. And there is the fuzzy side. That is the side in which we must envision how to put all this together and integrate it across disciplines and business units, from exploration to accounting and then across the industry as a whole. We are having a hard time with this one, and a lot of it has to do with the vestiges of our proprietary culture. To put it simply, we are still working in company silos and in disciplines and business units, each inventing a slightly different iteration of the same thing. A lot of you would probably pull me up short and tell me that is not true anymore. I will admit it is getting better but not nearly good enough. I have seen three of the majors’ plans for intelligent field operations. Each is fairly comparable, but each has those subtle differences that mark it as proprietary.

But that is only half the problem. Within each company, intelligent energy planning resides, mainly, in business unit or discipline silos. The plans I mentioned above were each for the E&P departments. I would bet that the accounting, HR and legal departments all have their own iterations of an intelligent operations plan that vary widely in their compatibility with other units.

So what’s the point? I believe that, within companies, and within the larger industry, completely open alliances will be required as will the advice of experts who have experience with the creation of intelligent operations systems in other industries — there are a number of industries that are much farther along the path than we are.

The good news is that I can see this beginning to happen. In conversations with CIOs and information managers from a variety of operators I have been heartened
to see efforts to integrate intelligent operations across business units within an open framework.

On the broader front, a promising new coalition has been formed to address the successful implementation of intelligent operations, among other business improvements, across several companies. Those companies include ConocoPhillips, Holly Corporation, Petrobras, Statoil and Tesoro. The companies will be advised by an industry value network (IVN) titled The SAP Oil & Gas Global Industry Advisory Council under the leadership of Bob Martin, SAP integration project manager, Conoco-Phillips. IVN members include Accenture, HP, IBM, Implico, KSS, LogicaCMG, Meridium, NRX, Quorum Business Solutions, TechniData, Triple Point, Vendavo and others. Working together, this group promises to increase “productivity and supply chain performance, lower total cost of ownership and provide a new level of interoperability and standards.”

Is this the direction we need to take? I sincerely think so. Most of us are too involved in day-to-day operations to step back and see the big picture. Most of us don’t have a lot of experience with such concepts. And most of us — at least the more mature generations — are still a bit proprietary in our thinking. That means we will need the folks with specific skills in this area, the folks that have done this before and the folks that are not burdened by ingrained concepts developed after a few years (and more) working in the business.

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