Even with the experience of delivering nearly forty real time/collaboration centers worldwide for oil companies or for its own offices, there was little sense of the routine as Schlumberger Information Solutions approached the design, construction, and use of its newest center for its Houston headquarters. Completed in 2007, the center promotes real-time and cross-discipline workflows for E&P teams while managing the competing needs of R&D to experiment and create new, more efficient workflows to optimize the search for and recovery of hydrocarbons. This facility meets needs for both intra and inter-company use and is designed with evergreen capabilities and maximum flexibility. Lessons learned as the center moved from initial design to daily use are shared along with the business side of managing one of the world's newest intelligent energy centers. Content Whether called centers of excellence, collaboration centers, real time operational rooms, or immersive visualization and interpretation environments, these facilities are designed to help oil companies or oil service companies solve today's oil and gas challenges through the use of innovative technologies and shared views. Several hundred have been built since the late 1990's with varying degrees of impact to oil companies. The facilities range in size and complexity from single rooms with one to two overhead projectors to energy centers with complex display environments and multiple use facilities. Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS) has built nearly 40 of the latter around the world either for clients desiring visualization and/or operational centers or for its own use. An existing executive briefing room in Houston was lost as a result of the corporate relocation from New York into the building at 5599 San Felipe. The decision was made to open a new center of enhanced room in 2007 with visualization technology and real time operations capabilities for oil companies and for internal use. While selecting projectors and network configurations would be important, SIS personnel first reviewed challenges and lessons learned from immersive centers built and used by other companies during the previous nine years. The majority of immersive centers with high-end display and computing technologies were constructed after 1998 with an especially rapid uptake and wide acceptance of their value by 2002. Early debates on design centered on rear versus front projection systems and relative benefits of curved versus flat screens for display of subsurface images. In addition, most centers were designed with a bias for use for peer review/integration of different technical disciplines but some were dedicated interpretation centers for high profile/large seismic volume projects. While most were successful, of particular interest were the ones that either had been removed because they were underutilized or where teams failed to realize the expected benefits. One such center was built by a large independent in the western United States for over one million USD yet was dismantled in less than two years. In another case, one of the largest multinational oil companies had two teams utilizing the same new center yet one team was twice as effective as the other even though both had identical access and decision support. These were reminders that investing in changing company culture and team alignment remain as important as the spend on technology and furniture. Other challenges were long term viability of centers and adapting them to changing conditions and business needs. Finally, our review showed that even the best centers had to proactively limit the use of the high end display rooms for large but static slide shows.
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