Tech Transfer Track

A Dynamic New Strategy for the Productivity of People and Capital

At the 2001 AAPG meeting, John Deck of Unocal spoke on "Enabling the Virtual Oil Company." Unocal's concept was simply stated: Leverage the 'Net for internal efficiency, effective partnering, efficient markets, and better use of capital.

One "virtual" tool stands out as essential to independent oil companies - electronic collaboration. At the 2001 SEG meeting, this author surveyed attendees about collaboration and electronic collaboration. Though rarely well understood, this tool probably represents the highest return, fastest payout of any information-technology investment today.

Let's set context. Collaboration is people working together. The oil industry collaborates all the time - people in oil companies with partner companies, service companies, consultants, national oil companies, and other government agencies. Geophysicists with geologists with engineers with production staff. Acquisition with processing with interpretation with drilling committees. Management with staff. And on and on.

More important are barriers to needed collaboration: Distance, dispersed teams, corporate boundaries, data types and formats, applications, E&P languages, country languages, and range of cultures.

Virtual collaboration is people working together electronically across barriers of distance, company, language, and culture. Data collaboration is virtual collaboration done with voice and information via software systems. Visual collaboration adds videoconferencing.
Done well, virtual collaboration will be the glue that holds the virtual oil company together. Done right, virtual collaboration simplifies processes, optimizes workflows, streamlines operations, empowers management, and accelerates leadership. It increases productivity, reduces costs, and improves decision making.

Interviews with Oil Companies

Two logical audiences can be reached at an industry trade show: Oil company personnel, and vendors.

Most oil-company respondents gave similar responses. Everyone agreed that collaboration is key to their success. Few knew about virtual collaboration as the use of software and video systems to empower virtual teams.

Once past initial definitions, most agreed that they collaborated electronically. Methods mentioned included:

E-mail: Including attachments

NetMeeting: Enables sharing of data and applications over networks plus abilities to take over other PCs and Unix systems. (Significantly updated by Microsoft in Windows XP)

PCAnywhere: Allows one to take over someone else's computer.

Visionarium: This and other visualization "caves" enable several people to work together on complex data sets.

No one mentioned SameTime, Quickplace, WebEx, Centra, Placeware, Raindance, eRooms, or any of the roughly two dozen sophisticated software products widely available.

The oil industry is as computerized and globally distributed as any industry in the world, yet the daily collaboration needs of people at their desks has not been broadly addressed. One respondent asked, "What if a key expert can't be in the Visionarium? What about the time when we aren't in the Visionarium?"

Interviews with Vendors

Most workstation vendors and some other companies are working on virtual collaboration systems in one or two modes. Synchronous collaboration is people working together in real time, as in meetings and video conferences. Asynchronous collaboration is working together in sequential events, as in e-mail and iterative co-authoring of documents.

For GeoQuest, collaboration is knowledge capture and sharing (asynchronous). They focus on handling multiple interpretations of the same data by different disciplines. Which one is best for new decision making? GeoQuest sets up virtual work places where data are stored with multi-level and data-specific security. An administrator assigns permissions to join groups, access data, and change data. People check data out, use or modify it, and check it back in. Automatic reports keep track of who did what, and when.

For Continuum Resources, collaboration is joint interpretation (synchronous). Data may be raw, processed, or interpretations from seismic, wells, production reports, facilities designs, etc. Continuum requires that data be in "VITOS" format and be duplicated to all collaboration locations. That is, collaborators always work on real data, not on screen images.

For OpenSpirit, collaboration is a (synchronous) side issue. If one works on the OpenSpirit "middleware" platform, applications become independent of data source. Data are "virtualized" to be accessed and used by any application. Though not their primary focus, the platform comes with data collaboration built in. Users can cooperate on workflow management, process parameterization, and operation of any application built on the OpenSpirit platform.

GX Technologies uses a proprietary (synchronous) collaboration system to gain competitive advantage over other service companies. Their expertise is accessible from anywhere by any number of people. GX clients also gain. They can monitor GX efforts and avoid travel and duplication of data, all with no capital expense and great convenience. Clients can manage projects from a distance. Indeed, GX mentioned a 5-way, 3-continent collaboration including a satellite link to Nairobi.

Conclusions

The benefits of electronic collaboration are very clear. Independents could wait for vendors to provide tools, but then vendors would control collaboration.

A better solution is to reverse the GX Technologies model - Build collaboration into your oil company so you can work from any distance, at any time, with anyone, on any topic, using any computers and data, with as many people as you need for as long as you need… to get the job done.

Gary Lundquist is Vice President of CollabraTec, a management-consulting firm which helps companies become more virtual by empowering their people with electronic collaboration. 303-840-9929, garylundquist@earthlink.net