Major initiatives under way will change the way we do business.

The new millennium will see many changes in the way we explore for oil and gas, design offshore platforms, drill and complete wells and optimize production. However, such changes will be incremental and pale in comparison to the sweeping paradigm changes information technology (IT) will bring to our industry.
"We are on the threshold of enormous new change," said Jeffrey Skilling, Enron president and chief executive officer. "Our business will be unrecognizable in 10 years. IT will be the driver of that change."

Knowledge management
Knowledge will surpass oil and gas reserves as the No. 1 asset in 21st century oil companies and service companies. "Data may be valuable, but knowing what to do with it is most valuable," said Bill Marko, principal with Navigant Consulting. "IT will help people make decisions. They will use IT to find nuggets that will lead to breakthroughs that will put them ahead of their competitors. The most exciting companies are managing knowledge. But they are not just capturing any knowledge, only the knowledge that's important. And when everybody has access to the entire knowledge base, that really equals knowledge squared."
Knowledge management is not capturing everybody's knowledge on the server and then dismissing the people. It is realizing that people comprise the engine to innovation, and connecting the people to the problem through information technology. Beware: Such collaboration tends to break down hierarchies.

T2B
Technology will no longer be for technology's sake, but to support business decisions. Technical-to-business (T2B) solutions will abound. For example, well-planning software will be integrated with cost data in the E-procurement system to optimize casing design.
"It is the next phase of digital Darwinism," said Dr. Jonathan Lewis, Landmark Graphics Corp. vice president. "The integration of technical applications with business enterprise systems will yield the greatest productivity improvements ever seen in our industry. Data acquisition will lead to risk assessment, which will lead to better decisions being made. Portfolio management theory will become the most important thing. Uncertainty distributions are technical products, after all, and senior executives will begin to accept them better."

Speech recognition
"In the third millennium, executives who type E-mails at speeds of less than 20 words per minute won't survive," said futurist Patrick Dixon, founder of Global Change Ltd. and author of the book FutureWise. Today's speech recognition technology can process 100 words per minute with 95% accuracy, and that is improving every year.
In the future, computer agents, or cyberclones, will follow verbal orders. Anticipating our information needs and preferences, they will screen the Web, filter E-mail and voice mail messages, and present data in our chosen formats. "You'll be able to say to your communications device, 'I want to talk to Bob in Chicago,' and the device will get you the best deal on the connection," said Kenan Sahin, Bell Labs vice president of software technology.

Automatic translation
One of the leaders in machine translation is Lernout & Houspie (www.lhs.be). This company is developing a speech-driven program whereby one can speak to an Internet access device, and someone else hears what is said in their own language.
"It's simply a matter of combining speech-recognition technology and automatic translation," said Bill Dunlap of Global Reach. "Of course, this product is still on the drawing board and probably won't be available in a readily marketable form for 5 years."

Internet and E-business
The interconnectedness of companies with their suppliers, partners and customers will blur borders of all kinds.
Countries, industries, markets and companies will be so wired together that their lines of demarcation may disappear. E-business will reinvent the way we do business, not in a gentle evolution, but in a dramatic revolution - an E-volution that will espouse completely new value propositions, especially when commodity prices are volatile. "Companies should focus on strategies, cementing relationships and agreements with partners and service providers," said Gary Adams of PricewaterhouseCoopers. "This is where our industry should be going. E-business enables strategy through system connections. Then a company can act as a portfolio manager."
"40% of the multinational energy companies will be virtual by the year 2010," predicted Dixon. "But the more virtual we are, the more we will need relationships. Technology doesn't satisfy us; humans are social creatures. Values like integrity, honesty, meeting obligations and mutual respect will win market share. The greatest challenge to the energy industry in the next decade will be to change fast enough to keep pace with the new technology and still be able to communicate our values."
"The Internet will evolve from being a complexity in our lives that we have to spend time mastering, to a behind-the-scenes tool that will improve our quality of life and, in the end, make us more human, not less," said Bell Labs' Sahin.

Portability
Said Global Reach's Dunlap, people soon will be Web-based no matter where they are: at the office, at home or on the road.
"We have already started hearing about the wireless Internet, which is encouraging hardware vendors to make portable Internet access devices - the next generation after the PalmPilot or portable phone," he said. Even the border between day and night will blur as people take their handheld offices with them wherever they go.
Communications devices will be the size of jewelry, and will be able to understand our voices. "The small metaphones on your lapel will be able to read Web sites and E-mail to you," said Joseph Olive, director of language modeling at Bell Labs. A video camera the size of a postage stamp will combine with a microscopic microphone to form a videophone that could fit on your wrist. Videoconferencing and bandwidth increases will give rise to virtual offices, and there will no longer be a need for business colleagues to gather in one building.

Molecular computers
Researchers in the field of nanotechnology at Rice University are homing in on a chemical computer that has circuits no larger than several atoms across.
While these molecular computers are 5 to 10 years from development, they are expected to be 100 billion times faster than today's most powerful PCs. Although silicon chips have gotten smaller and faster in the past 20 years, they are expected to reach their limit in the next decade because further miniaturization will approach the wavelength of light used to etch the circuits. At that point, molecular computers will take over the market, dooming the silicon chip to obsolescence like the vacuum tube.
"There are still several hurdles, but we are hot on the trail of the two fundamental components of such a computer," Rice professor Jim Tour told the Houston Chronicle. "In the next decade we should have a real, live, working system." One of those components is a molecular-scale switch that can be opened and closed repeatedly - a requirement for binary signals made of zeros and ones. Tour is using buckytubes, or elongated molecules of buckminsterfullerene (buckyballs), in his molecular switch research. The other component is a molecular device for holding RAM that would cost mere pennies, and Rice researchers are several months away from demonstrating such a device. The US government is considering doubling its federal funding of nanotechnology for 2001 to aid in such research.
Matter will become software, predicted James Ellenbogen of Mitre Corp. in McLean, Va. "In the 2020s you may be able to buy a recipe for a PC over the Internet, insert plastic and conductive molecules into your nanobox, and have it spit out a computer," he told BusinessWeek. When you download software today, you are rearranging the material structure on your disk by changing the magnetic properties of clumps of molecules. If molecular computers are no larger than those clumps, you could actually rearrange molecules on the disk to build chips, he explained.

Chip implants in humans
What if we could interact with the Internet through our own nervous system, rather than having to formulate our thoughts into words?
Professor Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading in England has made himself a guinea pig, implanting a chip in his own arm in an experiment to connect his own nervous system to the chip. Once the technique to interface electronics with a human nervous system is perfected, the next logical step would be to connect the interface to the Internet.
It is as hard for us to imagine the implications of where this technology could take us as it was for Jules Verne a century ago to imagine the 20th century. (Verne missed some big developments, such as TV, the computer and the Internet). But once scientists start tapping the level of the mind electronically, thoughts will render inputting of words obsolete. "There are more people than one thinks who do not consider this so far-fetched," Dunlap said.

Data-driven world
By the year 2025, the entire world will be encased in a communications skin, according to experts at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs. "We are already building the first layer of a meganetwork that will cover the entire planet like a skin," said Arun Netravali, president of Bell Labs. "As communication continues to become faster, smaller, cheaper and smarter in the next millennium, this skin, fed by a constant stream of information, will grow larger and more useful." Millions of electronic measuring devices will monitor every little change, storing this information on the network for analysis and decision-making by humans. Waiting by the phone, surfing the Internet and traveling for business will become as antiquated as carbon paper.

Playing to win
"This is the first hour of the first day of the first week of the digital future," said Dixon. "Technology you develop will be used by your competitors in 6 months. Those who believe in 'more of the same, but better' will be relegated to the role of defender, and few will survive. The attackers must be able to see 6 months ahead of their competitors. They have to make decisions at 10 times the speed of their competitors. Those who win will be those who change the rules of the game."