Maturing Collaboration Can Accelerate and Provide Support for Intelligent Energy
Authors: Wilson Adam 
Published: February 2015

This article, written by Editorial Manager Adam Wilson, contains highlights of paper SPE 150016, ’Collaboration as a Cornerstone of Intelligent Energy: How Collaboration Is Fundamental To Accelerate and Support IE Success,’ by Helen Gilman, SPE, and Michael Kuhn, SPE, Wipro, prepared for the 2012 SPE Intelligent Energy International, Utrecht, The Netherlands, 27-29 March. The paper has not been peer reviewed.

Collaboration is a cornerstone of many successful intelligent-energy (IE) programs; however, as an industry, we are still in the early stages on the journey of where collaboration and IE could take us. The results from 24 IE assessments across different companies and assets point to collaboration as the most commonly recommended opportunity area for inclusion within IE initiatives. A collaboration-maturity model and roadmap explain the current state and potential future developments of collaboration across the industry.

Current State of Collaboration

Some examples of collaboration are cross-discipline teams, remote collaboration between locations, synchronous and asynchronous decision making, external-partner collaboration, and any combination of those.

Early collaboration initiatives, such as drilling centers and remote asset centers, showed success, and, over time, these initiatives have grown into fundamental components of the IE vision for many oil and gas companies. From these early deployments, two basic types of collaboration environments have emerged: centralized specialist centers and cross-discipline asset centers.

Centralized specialist centers usually focus on a small group of key operational processes to support across multiple fields. Subject-matter experts are dedicated to work in the environment supporting the field teams with process support and troubleshooting recommendations. Cross-discipline asset centers are dedicated environments that an asset team uses to support a wide array of decision-making processes. These two types of collaboration environments have emerged from different perspectives; however, actual collaboration-environment deployments may incorporate elements of both types into their solution.

Capturing value as part of collabo-ration initiatives has been a subject of debate for many years. Futile efforts to allocate value across people, process, and technology in collaboration projects have caused some operators to reclassify collaboration as an enabler to value as opposed to the delivery mechanism.

Although value remains difficult to quantify for collaboration initiatives, several themes have emerged that help companies continue to invest in and gain value from collaboration. Some of those themes are as follows:

Significant upfront investment in facilities or infrastructure is no longer needed to improve collaboration.

Collaboration requirements have increased beyond the colocated asset team or simple onshore/offshore connection.

Collaboration is not seen as a standalone solution in the portfolio of IE solutions but as a key enabler to the broader IE vision.

Additional benefits emerge as collaboration environments are used more widely throughout an organization.