Digital Decisions

The four men who founded Landmark were also its first multidisciplinary team: Andy Hildebrand and John Mouton had started their own geophysical consulting company; Bob Limbaugh was head of a computing-systems division at Digicom; and Roice Nelson had left Mobil and was running the seismic-acoustics lab at the University of Houston. Peebler likes to tell a story of an early skeptic who insisted that the company's 3-D focus didn't make sense because 98% of the data being collected was two dimensional. But the foursome proved to be right, and 3-D interpretation became the norm. Today, Landmark is pushing "4-D" -- 3-D images viewed over time to chronicle changes. "We like to play at the front of the technology curve, because that's where the value is actually created," Peebler says.

Over the years, Landmark has expanded its operation by acquiring technology leaders in other areas, such as engineering and reservoir modeling. Since 1992, the company has grown from 100 employees and $42 million in revenue to 1,500 employees and $300 million in revenue. The challenge has been blending those acquisitions into a single organization. "Each one was a stand-alone company, so boy, did each one have walls," says Rozsa. "Of course, this reflected exactly how the industry worked. But we couldn't perpetuate that if we were going to improve anything. So we merged the scientific domains, the diverse cultures, the work flows, and the technologies into one unified company."

The evidence of teamwork and integration is everywhere. It's in the distributed, multidisciplinary project teams, like the integrated products group that Tim White, director of strategic earth-modeling initiative, put together earlier this year. In just two months, seven developers in Houston, Austin, and Denver built a cutting-edge modeling application, integrating various data from the ground up, not after the fact. It's in the way that the "four-digit IQs," as Gibson refers to the top scientists, and Landmark's other developers convene at an annual conference to demo their work, to brainstorm on future products, and to socialize. They hand out "Top Gun" performance awards and other offbeat prizes, like the Custer's Last Stand Award for the team that persevered despite an impossible goal. It's in the temporary third-floor office that Gibson put together earlier this year, which consisted of vice presidents who had never worked side-by-side but were asked to share a cluster of cubicles. By brainstorming over the cappuccino machine or problem solving in the adjacent ultramodern conference room, they set an example for interdepartmental communication and collaboration. It's also in the good-natured but intense volleyball rivalry between the Austin and Denver offices, in the simultaneous release of the company's latest versions of its integrated applications, and, of course, in the Decisionarium, which was created by yet another cross-functional team. As White says, "This company is no place for lone wolves."

Inside the Decisionarium

For Landmark's customers, the role of the Decisionarium is to help a collection of lone wolves become a well-orchestrated pack. Being in the same room with the same data helps the group to reconcile differences. "Everything becomes very, very obvious on the big screen," says BP Amoco's Watson. The Decisionarium also short-circuits the logistics of teamwork. There's no need to schedule a series of meetings or play phone-tag. "We've seen a team go through six weeks of work in six hours," Wille says. And if someone is stuck on a rig, Landmark transmits the 3-D data to that person's desktop so that he or she can still don goggles and participate.

Some customers are wary that the Decisionarium will help them make more mistakes faster. But one reason that the facility has increased customers' exploration success rate is because the image is interactive. Teams can look at multiple hypotheses. What if the fault is over here instead of there? What if this well could hit three targets instead of one? What if we hit water instead of oil?

Landmark leases the Houston Decisionarium so that customers can discover the value for themselves. One test-drive usually does it. By lunchtime, customers who arrived skeptical that morning are ordering takeout to avoid interrupting the team's momentum. One enthusiastic customer inquired about leasing the facility for a few months but decided against it; as it turns out, buying one was cheaper. The typical Decisionarium package sells for around $500,000, but if you go "whole hog" -- on a theater-size facility and 40-foot screen -- Wille says you could spend as much as $2 million. Statoil didn't splurge for that package, but it did buy two standard packages, which it considers a relative bargain. "It creates millions of dollars of value," says Henriquez. "So the investment is peanuts."