Collaborative Work Environments in Smart Oil Fields

In the last decade, oil companies are increasingly viewing collaborative work environments as an important component of their smart oil fields programs. Collaborative work environments (CWEs) have been implemented by several major oil companies, to support the use of technology in smart oil fields. The implementation of these collaborative work environments is not without problems. After major oil companies successfully implemented the hardware, tools and applications in CWEs, organizational design challenges remained unsolved. The biggest challenge is to change behavior of staff and to effectively integrate people across disciplinary boundaries. This chapter emphasizes the importance of the organizational aspect of CWEs in smart oil fields. The objective of this chapter is to provide the upstream petroleum industry with guidelines for the organizational design of the collaborative work environments, in support of the operation of smart oil fields. In order to provide the organizational design guidelines, a PhD research was conducted at three different operating units of a major oil company. This research focused on the business processes, organizational structure, and competencies of staff in the CWEs.