I believe the petroleum industry is entering an era of growth in which the new core competency will be the ability to leverage knowledge assets more efficiently.

Global demand for oil and gas may increase dramatically over the next decade, but oil prices will likely remain flat. The technical challenges and costs of finding and producing energy resources grow every year, while new discovery sizes decline. To prosper, E&P organizations must learn to harness new information technologies to reduce cycle times and boost productivity. Those that embrace technology early will reap the greatest rewards. Laggards may not even survive.

Since the 1950s, key technologies have caused major productivity leaps in the industry. Widespread use of well logs and 2- D seismic greatly improved structural interpretation, but the introduction of 3-D seismic in the 1980s provided even better structural imaging. Today, integration of all geophysical, geologic, and engineering data is enabling highly detailed 3-D (and 4-D) reservoir characterization and simulation.

The next exponential leap in productivity will occur when E&P companies become both "informationalized" and integrated at the enterprise level. I call these "I²" enterprises." Enabled by information technologies such as desktop systems, client/server computing, and distributed databases, I² enterprises will access information from all parts of the organization. They will integrate the knowledge and ideas of all E&P disciplines. Ultimately, they will nuke better business decisions in less time.

Four levels of integration are needed to achieve this level of productivity: (1) mechanical integration of technical data, (2) workflow integration within project teams and operating groups, (3) integration of processes across different operational groups, and (4) company-wide integration of all business information to allocate resources more profitably.

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