The paper will describe the approach adopted by Eni E&P Division to provide E&P professionals with a Web-based collaborative environment where technical know-how can be easily captured and reused along all phases of an E&P project. The paper will specifically focus on a case study related to the reservoir characterization workflow. The environment provides the functionality needed to access the different types of technical data and information that are relevant to each phase of the project, and to quickly consolidate the results and transform them into company knowledge. In the first phase of a reservoir characterization workflow, the focus is on finding all the information relevant to the asset under study. This includes reports from prior studies, updated seismic interpretation models, data from new wells. This can be considered as the available “asset knowledge” and it is retrieveable through integrated searches across both traditional Oracle databases and document management systems. In the following phases, the interpretation process is started. The environment provides tools to access the best available “professional knowledge” to carry out the work. This can be achieved by leveraging on collaborative application sessions with geographically distributed experts, as well as by using powerful semantic search tools to find out the best approaches used in similar studies. Finally, the environment allows the automatic capture and indexing of the generated interpretation data and reporting documents for later reuse. This includes the consolidation of the lessons learnt from the project into “workflow knowledge”: the environment will automatically instantiate a live “best practice” for reservoir characterization for any future project.
Knowledge Management and e-Business: The Oil and Gas Industry in the 21st Century