Digital Decisions

That's certainly true in the oil-and-gas business -- a high-risk industry where multimillion-dollar decisions are a daily reality. Consider the Gulf of Mexico, where large reservoirs of oil are tucked several miles below the ocean floor. After spending millions to reach those depths, companies discover hydrocarbons (oil and gas) just 25% of the time. Even then, geologic conditions may prohibit them from recovering more than half of that oil. Landmark believes it can help its customers double their success rate and cut their costs by 25% in the next five-year period.

"This industry has more technological demands than most people realize," says Landmark President and CEO Bob Peebler, 52. "This isn't 'The Beverly Hillbillies,' where you fire a shotgun, and oil starts bubbling out. It's a combination of geophysics, geology, petrophysics, and engineering."

The main challenge, of course, is that scientists can't see or visit the earth's subsurface. To overcome this obstacle, exploration companies gather as much meaningful data as possible. "Basically, we do what doctors do -- sort of a cat scan of the earth," says Gibson. "But believe me, it's easier to get an image of the brain than it is to get one of the earth four miles underground."

Getting that initial image requires teamwork, because when viewed individually, the specialists' snapshots don't provide enough information for scientists to fully envision the area. But together, these narrow glimpses form a more complete picture -- not a sharply focused picture, by any means, but a clearer picture. It's like detective work, with much of the evidence missing. Despite recent technological advancements, Peebler says, "there are still more unknowns than knowns. At the end of the day, those barrels exist only in digital form until you've actually produced them."

The geophysicists base their interpretation on voluminous seismic data. They look for telling shapes: faults, hills, valleys, stream channels -- anything that could indicate the presence of reservoir sands. Meanwhile, geologists are looking at the same field, the same rocks, from another perspective, poring over log data from dozens, even hundreds, of other wells in the area. It's not unusual for the geophysicists and geologists to reach significantly different conclusions about the field, like art critics who disagree about the same painting's meaning. "Everybody's got a different way of looking at what they can't see and predicting what it is," says Ted Rozsa, 52, a vice president of strategic relations at Landmark. "So you have barriers between the different domains."

There's another reason for those barriers: The exploration and production process is often segmented, broken down by discipline. It's as though by using different data and terminology, the geoscientists and engineers don't -- or won't -- speak the same language. "The work is done serially, and at any given handoff, you can lose valuable information," Wille says. "It's a little like assembling a car, and you don't find out until it's too late that the door doesn't fit the frame."

Landmark has streamlined this drawn-out, hierarchical process by changing where decisions are made, how data is assessed, and who's involved. The main concept behind the Decisionarium is that better decisions spring from integration -- integrated data, integrated workflows, integrated teams.

The concept appeals to BP Amoco PLC, a Landmark neighbor in Houston that prides itself on its own innovation-driven, team-oriented approach. In mid-1998, the oil giant sent a subsurface team down Memorial Drive to try this technology at Landmark. It didn't take long to make good use of it. After reviewing the drilling plans, the team agreed to reduce the number of wells it would dig. BP Amoco won't divulge how much the move saved the company, but "it's significant when you consider that a mile of pipeline can easily cost a million dollars," says Morag Watson, 32, business information manager.

However many millions it was, the experience was enough to convince BP Amoco to build a visualization facility of its own, which it named the hive (Houston Immersive Visualization Environment). Earlier this year, while addressing industry analysts, Amoco's much-celebrated CEO, Sir John Brown, cited the facility as one of the company's more productive ways of working. In fact, it's now building visualization environments at its other major locations.

In the initial session, the pilot team discovered the facility's enormous potential by making the sort of decision that ordinarily would take weeks because team members are distributed among several offices. "You're not passing around a piece of paper with some data written on it," Watson says. "You're looking at the subsurface, and there is little scope for misinterpretation. The big difference was having everybody in the same room, looking at the same picture."