1887
Volume 24, Issue 1
  • ISSN: 0263-5046
  • E-ISSN: 1365-2397

Abstract

Jamie Cruise and Ugur Algan of Volantice review the effectiveness of current information management (IT) systems for the E&P and predict changes which will come from focusing on businesss process modelling and software advances from outside the E&P sector. As knowledge workers, we recognize that the outcome of a project will be impacted by how effectively we are able to gather relevant data and feed these data into the variety of computer applications that underpin our work. However, most of us would rather focus our efforts on the primary goals of the projects we work on, which are dependent on our analysis and design skills, rather than the mundane business of Information Management (IM). Unfortunately, the history of the E&P business shows that the IM burden is increasing rather than decreasing for information managers as well as end users, even though a number of new productivity tools have been introduced over the past decade. This situation adversely affects the effectiveness of E&P teams and the quality of their decisions. A number of factors contribute to this increase in the IM burden: ■ Increase in volume and diversity of available information: real-time drilling operations and production monitoring data; smart wells; 4D & 4C seismic; pre-stack seismic; multi-scenario projects with stochastic models, simulation, and optimization. ■ An increasing gap between existing IM standards and best practices, and the IM needs of newly introduced, widelyadopted, innovative tools and applications ■ A tighter regulatory environment leading to an increased need to audit our processes for compliance (e.g. Sarbanes- Oxley, Basel II, IFRS etc.). We must be able to identify the provenance of every piece of knowledge, information and data that supports our key decisions ■ Continued consolidation of operating companies, resulting in major challenges to resolve differences in technical platforms, skills, culture, and IM practices across previously disparate groups. ■ A change in demographics, leading to a shortage of skilled and experienced resources, resulting in increased pressure to preserve and disseminate corporate knowledge. In this article, we explore opportunities for innovations that may solve the dual problems of delivering information to our geoscientists, engineers, and managers, as well as capturing the results of their work in a way that allows easy re-use in other contexts. We discuss the use of business process modelling (BPM), which we believe will be an integral part of these future solutions. BPM drives the flow of information through the enterprise according to the needs of the endusers rather than forcing the users to adapt their processes to fit with convoluted IM systems. Furthermore, we believe that these innovations will be spurred on by advances in software developed and deployed by the broader (non-E&P) business community. The emergence of freely available enterprise class infrastructure and end-user components (such as Linux and other open source initiatives) should signal a further move away from proprietary technology for E&P systems. Of particular interest is the widespread acceptance of service oriented architecture (SOA) as the dominant approach for constructing dynamic, process-oriented systems that combine data and functionality from a variety of widely distributed sources.

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/content/journals/0.3997/1365-2397.24.1.26809
2006-01-01
2024-03-29
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  • Article Type: Research Article
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