Technology Focus: Knowledge Management and Training (October 2012)
Authors: Saputelli Luigi 
Published: February 2015

Technology Focus

The petroleum industry is being pushed to meet global environmental challenges as well as to develop cost-efficient energy resources for the centuries to come; however, the process to develop new technologies appears not to meet expectations. SPE has invested valuable resources in establishing the technological tools to adapt to new times. Although online communities, global connectivity, knowledge management, and computing power attempt to provide a platform for innovation, we may still fail to generate fast-enough answers.

As shown in the cases presented in this review, our industry has consistently demonstrated ways to assimilate vast amounts of data, improve multidisciplinary decision-making processes, and automate procedures to preserve knowledge. Typical challenges we face are the generation gap, lack of leadership, and misuse of staff resources.

Beyond the boundaries of the petroleum industry, criticism—nonconstructive problem solving—is the dominant form of dialogue. We need to realize how collaboration and cooperation may drive innovation to create a sustainable future for our society.

Collaboration involves all stakeholders flowing together and fundamentally changing their individual approaches to sharing of resources and responsibilities as well as changing ways of working and knowledge dissemination. To collaborate is to work jointly with others, especially in an intellectual endeavor. Truly collaborative processes enable differing and possibly conflicting views to merge and create something new and previously unimagined. Collaboration needs a purposeful starting point. It requires a problem or a potential and a desire to deal with it. In other words, collaboration requires a desire to change. It also requires clear organizational support that is rarely present, which explains why most successful collaborations are not set in an organizational context at all.

Cooperation, on the other hand, is where participants maintain their separate mandates and responsibilities and engage in most work in the way they see as appropriate but may agree to do some work together or present work for review by other stakeholders or departments in order to meet a common goal.

Innovation is about divergent thinking and the creation of something new, and collaboration is an essential tool for achieving it. Like all creative forces, it is messy and unpredictable. Unlike cooperation and collaborations, it may not be a planned exercise or a cooking recipe.

If our online communities cannot foster collaboration, then they will fall short of the hype and ambitions they have set for themselves. Conversely, communities that figure out how to enable their members to collaborate (as opposed to merely cooperate) may end up having a decisive advantage.

Recommended additional reading at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org.

SPE 150233 Challenges in Managing People To Implement an Integrated Operations System: A Petrobras Case Study in an Operational Unit of Exploration and Production by Cézar Augusto Monteiro Siqueira, Petrobras, et al.

SPE 150314 State of the Art of Artificial Intelligence and Predictive Analytics in the E&P Industry: A Technology Survey by César Bravo, Halliburton, et al.

SPE 147118 Toward Rapid Expert-Driven Learning Content Development, Embedded Learning, and Reduced Time to Market by Meta Rousseau, Baker Hughes

OTC 23276 The Modelbase: An Architecture for Organizational Adaptive Decision Making by Mike Whiteside, Indeva

OTC 23620 The New Edge in Knowledge: How Knowledge Management Is Changing the Way We Do Business by Cindy Hubert, APQC