Broad industry trends that are reshaping exploration and production (E&P) operations warrant a rethinking of traditional operating models as part of strategies designed to optimize the development and production of oil and gas assets. Shell E&P is introducing a new collaborative operating model as part of its global digital oilfield strategy. The collaborative model leverages the expertise of its global workforce through redesigned business processes and specially designed collaborative facilities to capture maximum benefits from its investment in smart digital oilfield technologies. Each collaborative environment shares a common, standards-based information technology (IT) architecture that can enable the linking of offices, platforms, and remote operation sites into a single global network providing real-time access to Shell E&P's community of expert practitioners and a common, shared institutional knowledge base. An important contributing factor to Shell E&P's success in introducing collaboration has been its ability to effectively shape a culture of collaboration and teamwork through trust, knowledge sharing, and continuous institutional learning. This paper examines one key element in the success of these collaborative centres by adopting innovative methods that Shell E&P is using to more effectively capture and share its institutional knowledge and experience through a culture of continuous enterprise learning. While this organizational transformation remains work in process, initial findings confirm the initiative is delivering tangible results towards the goal of optimizing production and recovery from assets. Introduction The E&P industry is undergoing a period of significant transition. The business now recognizes that there is no more "easy oil." New developments are more complex and more technically challenging; increasingly, they have multiple sites and are located in geographically remote regions. Operators also face a reality that there are fewer opportunities for new development, resulting in increased competition that is fueling continuous demands from resource owners to increase recovery from existing assets. Enhanced recovery requires operators to adopt new approaches to optimizing production by using sophisticated new "smart" technologies that are operationally challenging. These technologies require significant capital outlays that are accompanied by rising operating costs and the cost of environmental compliance and mitigation. Exploiting these new technologies requires staff to learn new skills, work together in new ways, and develop new capabilities that challenge traditional operating models. This transformation is introducing significant organizational change at a time when the industry faces a shrinking pool of qualified new recruits and a "graying workforce" and is at risk of losing critical institutional knowledge and experience that are essential to overcoming these challenges. How the industry responds to these challenges will determine a new order in the E&P business as well as its ability to meet the resource demands of the world economy. Background Shell E&P is responding to these challenges through its global Smart Fields® initiative, transforming its global assets into smart assets by establishing a foundation of core technologies and collaborative work environments (CWE) that enable offshore and onshore personnel and experts worldwide to work together as teams to improve production performance and recovery of hydrocarbons throughout the value loop. Smart Fields represents Shell E&P's vision and operational principles that provide individual assets the core capabilities necessary to achieve and sustain continuous optimization in the short-term and throughout the asset life cycle.

When Captain Kirk from the "USS Enterprise" gave the command "Bean me up, Scotty" to his transporter chief in the science fiction television series, Paramount Pictures Corporation's "Star Trek®," he may not have realized that he was a frontrunner in introducing a new way of working that soon will be reality in the exploration and production (E&P) industry.With continued growing demand for energy foreseen in the future, the E&P industry has to face, and will continue to face, significant challenge as it moves toward delivering these energy needs. These challenges include growing global demand, declining mature fields, and entry into remote, harsh, undeveloped and geopolitically-challenging environments requiring teams to minimize travel and collaborate across disciplines (reservoir engineering, production, maintenance) more efficiently.To meet these challenges, the industry is re-shaping its way of working, adopting collaborative operating models and smart technologies. The industry is transitioning away from thinking of silos and moving toward multidisciplinary teams working collaboratively. This movement is designed to ensure that the reduced workforce and work processes are effectively utilized in combination with the existing and future tools to insure improved capability for efficiently managing its assets. The primary solution for addressing these challenges, and enabling this collaborative operating model, is the deployment of collaborative work environments. At the moment, most collaborative work environments and their concurrent collaboration models are set up locally. However, the rapid evolution of workforce and technology changes are forcing this industry to look toward the next generation of collaboration that must take place beyond borders. This paper reflects the state of collaborative work environments today and explores the future role of collaborative work environments (CWEs), outlining how the CWE solution must evolve to address key challenges over the horizon and enable a new global and virtual collaboration model.The E&P industry is faced with a difficult reality: Real change requires a real mindset change. Are we ready for it?

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In Shell, asset professionals use advanced technologies and processes for field management and optimising production performance. Real time monitoring of wells and compressors has become the norm, delivering higher uptime and increased production. Asset teams use visual information on hundreds of wells and their facilities using a web-based portal. The wells and facilities with events or deviations, i.e. exceptions, are highlighted, enabling the staff to focus on fixing the critical wells and facilities. The information is brought together in Collaborative Work Environments with video connection to streamline the communication between field and office and speed up decision making. Shell has implemented these capabilities in a number of assets around the world, for example in Oman, Russia, Brunei, UK and Gulf of Mexico. The people side is a large part of the attention, during the implementation and for sustainability of the solutions. Awareness sessions, training, local ownership, feedback sessions, coaching and regular reviews are part of the embedding activities. The paper describes the capabilities and the benefits, and illustrates this with a field case from Salym in Russia. This includes the approach to change management and learning from both the project and the embedding phase. The benefits include HSE improvements (less travel exposure), increased production and reduced operating cost.

After major petroleum companies successfully implemented the hardware, tools and applications in Collaborative Work Environments (CWE), human factor issues remain unsolved. Working in these Collaborative Work Environments cuts across traditional disciplinary and geographically dispersed boundaries. Less hierarchical reporting relationships and multi-disciplinary teams replace clear-cut single hierarchical reporting relationships and single-disciplinary teams. The new way of collaborative working calls for supporting organic organizational structure for the CWE. Most current organizational structures of operating units are divided into several divisions (for example oil, gas or geographical divisions). In turn, these divisions are organized into functional technical departments (for example Reservoir Engineers together in one department and Production Technologists in another department). Alignment of the overall traditional functional organizational structures of the operating unit with the more organic structure of the CWE is a real challenge. In the past, the petroleum industry had many different forms of organizational structure. To capture both functional requirements and the need to collaborate, they have returned to the matrix structure. We provide empirical results of several cases of Collaborative Work Environments (of different operating units) in the petroleum industry. We show both the issues faced and the path chosen by the operating units to align the overall organizational structure of the operating unit with the Collaborative Work Environment structure.