Brief: Information Technology as an Aid to Productivity in Petroleum Exploration - Fact or Fiction?

Abstract

Summary This paper considers the relationship between information technology investment, technical productivity, and business benefit. The effect of introducing IT to the industry and its impact on geoscience is described, along with a discussion of whether investment in IT has brought the expected benefits to other industries. The paper concludes with a consideration of the present business perceptions of IT and asks whether a company, by concentrating solely on such issues as technical productivity, will actually maximize the benefits of IT. Introduction The upstream petroleum industry has progressively adopted IT since the mid-1950's to aid technical operations. By the late 1980's, nearly all exploration companies had invested heavily in IT. Recently, many companies have begun to scrutinize the costs and benefits of IT more closely. As in other industries, there has been a movement in the petroleum industry to constrain IT expenditures. A major justification for continued investment in IT has been that the resulting technological change will directly improve business performance through increased productivity. This contention is now being questioned in the more difficult operating conditions of the early 1990's because of a growing belief that IT investment has not produced many of the supposed benefits. Application of IT in Petroleum Exploration The deployment of IT in petroleum exploration has had a significant impact on technical practices. The initial applications of IT were in areas like reservoir modeling, seismic processing, and mapping, which required intensive numeric calculations. During the late 1970's and early 1980's, hardware advances (e.g., the appearance of workstations) and software developments (e.g., on-line editors and on-screen graphics) enabled the creation of interactive applications. The possibility of manipulating and interpreting geological data on screen was regarded in many companies as a significant aid to productivity and critical to achieving technical excellence.