This article was taken from the July 1994 issue of World Oil, p.23. The section is titled "What's Happening in Exploration" and is edited by David E. LeLeux.
Recent data management advances can help engineering and geoscience professionals capture their critical, repeated precodures and valuable insights. With this industry's coutless cutbacks and layoffs of experienced personnel, tools are need to capture the wisdom being lost and to document it is an easy-to-get-to and organized form.
The HyperEdge Best Practices technique, a concept developed by HyperMedia Corp., documents the "how to" of a work process and appends pertinent knowledge associated with a given process to the document through use of leading-edge information management (hypermedia) software. The result is a digital record of critical "best practices" that is usable, widely distributable, and continuously maintainable.
Roice Nelson, company co-founder, says "Any company's best practices must be documented and distributed before they can be referred to, applied and improved upon. This enable and encourages continuous improvement." To illustrate the types of processes that can be capture, HyperMedia has begun building a library of time-proven work processes such as:
3-D seismic processing
Reservoir pressure maintenace
Subsalt exploration-low cost methods
Petroleum prospect risk analysis
GIS/Digital information storage
Role of technical development director
Completing horizontal wells, and
Goemechanics of fractored reservoirs.
Broad or narrow, any type of work process can be documented using the technique. One of this industry's greatest assets, the wisdom of it's professionals, can thereby be maintained, appled and advanced.