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The WISDOM of working on the Web
, Experience is the best teacher and the mother of WISDOM
 
Jurry   Swart
  Principle Programmer and Production Process Owner
  Shell U.K. Exploration and Production
Northern Business Unit
Seafield House
Hill of Rubislaw
Aberdeen   Scotland  United Kingdom  AB15 6GZ
Phone: 44 1224 817652
Fax: 44 1224 817700
Email: J.Swart@OPENMAIL2.UEDN663.sukepabe.simis.com
 
Biographical notice:
 
Jurry R. Swart
 Database Publishing Systems Ltd  
 Mackenzie, Colin  
 Swindon  
 United Kingdom  
 
Jurry Swart, Chemical Engineer by background, joined Shell International in 1984 and has since worked in The Netherlands, Oman, Brunei and the United Kingdom. His main discipline is Production Operations and he has a steering role in the development and implementation of IT solutions which enable business improvement.
 
Colin   Mackenzie
  Projects Business Unit Manager
  Database Publishing Systems Ltd
608 Delta Business Park
Great Western Way
Swindon   Wiltshire  United Kingdom  SN5 7XF
Phone: 44 1793 512515
Fax: 44 1793 512516
Email: Colin.Mackenzie@dpsl.co.uk
 
Biographical notice:
 
Colin Mackenzie
 
Colin Mackenzie manages the Projects Business Unit at DPSL of Swindon, taking overall responsibility for all projects undertaken. Colin was previously employed by DPSL as a project manager/consultant working on intranet and cd-rom document delivery and integration projects.
 
Prior to working at DPSL, Colin worked for many years as a programmer then development manager for Miles 33. He has extensive experience in the field of technical documentation, Newspaper Publishing, Desktop Publishing, Electronic Publishing and Pre-Press systems with expertise in search, printing, and Internet technologies.
 
ABSTRACT:
 
Shell U.K. Exploration and Production (Shell Expro) has a large body of controlled, technical documentation held in SGML. This documentation covers standards, procedures and descriptions of assets used by production staff on the North Sea oil platforms, and has been successfully delivered in paper and cd-rom format for a number of years. As is typical with formal, controlled documents, the information provided does not include additional "dynamic" information that can provide vital information to support the activities of the end users.
 
With the changes in management style and the introduction of empowered self-managing teams, it was realised that the information needs of the workforce were changing. Where the traditional management style required technicians to follow procedures in a 'do as you are told' fashion, the empowered teams now need access to information on which they can base their business decisions. This required the linkage of textual information with facility performance data.
 
Shell Expro and DPSL have worked together to develop a prototype system called WISDOM (Water Injection System for Development and Operations Management) aimed at increasing the efficiency of a complex hardware system (the Water Injection System) on a production platform. Furthermore, with advances in reservoir management and modelling techniques allowing for more refined reservoir depletion strategies, it was realised that better communication was required between the offshore based surface facility operations and the onshore-based petroleum engineers. In order to obtain optimal results, it became evident that offshore and onshore staff needed to share the same information.
 
The business improvement of the Water Injection System system will be achieved by providing an intranet-based collaborative knowledge system that will combine "static" controlled SGML documentation with supplementary training information and "dynamic" status information allowing the users to contribute to the expert knowledge held by their company. The "dynamic" information includes:
 
  • "hints and tips" that have been gathered over the years by experienced technicians;
  • live discussion groups used to debate best practice;
  • bulletin boards to enhance communication between onshore and offshore personnel and between shifts; and
  • live graphs of key performance factors linked to supplementary textual information.
 
This paper aims to show that by providing technical documentation users with a collaborative environment in which information is directly related to the performance of their business, that business processes (and therefore performance) can be improved.
 
 

Background
 
With the ever increasing focus on 'sweating' existing assets, Shell U.K. Exploration and Production (Shell Expro) realised that different ways of working were required in order to achieve significant business improvement. A team consisting of platform operations staff, onshore-based petroleum engineers and the authors was tasked with improving the performance of a large hardware system on the North Cormorant oil platform. The system in question is the Water Injection System, which consists of high-volume pumping equipment and filters on the platform and a number of water injection wells (see figure 1). This system injects some 40,000 thousand cubic meters of water a day into the sub-surface reservoir to enable the extraction of some 6,000 barrels of oil per day. It was felt that the Water Injection System was not being run to its full potential.

 
Animation of Water Injection

 
 
Following an assessment of issues surrounding the present performance of the water injection system it was chosen to address the problems in three ways:
 
  1. via changes to production processes and hardware;
  2. by rolling-out a software solution to analyse and optimise settings; and
  3. via a software solution to provide knowledge and a team-based collaborative working environment.
 
 
The software solution (the subject of this presentation) would be based on a combination of SGML and non-SGML data sources, delivered as part of a new working environment for the users. The data would provide supplementary information supporting the day-to-day activities of the users and the changes to systems and processes as a result of the other facets of the project.
 
As the teams responsible for the Water Injection System are separated by some 250 km of the North Sea and work different shift patterns, the solution was going to have to be an innovative one.
 
The project was to be developed as part of the Shell Leadership Performance (LEAP) Focus Results Delivery (FRD) program. This provided the focus and funding for the project but also set the challenge that the project had very high visibility and the system created by the project team had to be operational in 90 days.
 
It was decided to call the system WISDOM (Water Injection System for Development and Operations Management) which reflected the relation to the subject matter as well as provided a connotation to knowledge management. Shell Expro enlisted the help of Database Publishing Systems Ltd (DPSL) to design and build the solution.
 
 

Project Approach
 
To ensure the success of the project, it was vital to create a project team with varied skill sets and to involve the end users in the design and implementation of the system. The project team was composed of petroleum engineering and production staff from Shell Expro, a technical author and animator from Offshore Design Ltd (ODL) and staff from DPSL. To complete the project in the short time available was going to require dedication, long working hours and a close working relationship between participants. The team was forged by working together on high impact team building exercises, culminating in a requirements session allowing the users to state what they needed from a system.
 
 

The Issues
 
The system had to solve a number of issues:
 
  1. Communication - geographically remote staff working different shifts had to work together exchanging knowledge.
  2. Education - new staff, procedures, and tools require documentation and training. Staff had been empowered without being provided with the knowledge to enable them to fulfil their potential.
  3. Document Management - many documents containing useful information were uncontrolled and not held electronically or in a central repository. Users had many useful tips to improve production operations based on their experience. This information is typically not included in centrally produced, controlled documentation and is therefore not shared with other users.
  4. Business Impact - users were not necessarily clear as to how their activities affected the efficiency and therefore profitability of the company (e.g. offshore short-term targets may have conflicted with onshore medium-term targets).
  5. Lack of interest in existing documentation - One major challenge for the system would be to provide users with the information in an attractive format to encourage the use of the system. While the existing cd-rom documentation held accurate, managed SGML, the users found the format unattractive and found it difficult to access.
 
 
 

Technical Infrastructure
 
Shell had an existing Intranet system that could be used to host the proposed system. While the Intranet provided the network access and HTML delivery mechanism, it could not alone solve the document management or collaboration issues. The team selected OpenText's Livelink system (after a brief evaluation) to provide a suite of collaboration and document management facilities through an easy-to-use Web browser interface.
 
Having decided on Livelink as the environment to host the content, the team decided to utilise and enhance the existing comprehensive SGML content and to link it to other information sources (design drawings, data sheets, animation, etc.). New content would also be developed in SGML and Macromedia Director to provide information on the sub-surface reservoir. The corporate choice of Netscape 3 as a browser meant that the SGML had to be converted using OmniMark 3 into graphically rich HTML.
 
As one of the main aims of the project was to provide an integrated environment for the users to work in, the Livelink system was enhanced to host the HTML content seemlessly within a project environment. Further enhancements were performed to allow the associations between the controlled, "delivered" documentation, and discussion groups, allowing the users to collaborate using the technical documentation as a base point and common reference.
 
In order to provide users with the information they require to relate their activities to the performance of their asset, live links were developed between the Expro equipment readings database and the WISDOM system. Graphs are created automatically in Excel and referenced from the system.
 
 

Developing The SGML Content
 
Expro had a large repository containing SGML content covering technical descriptions and procedures. This content would provide the WISDOM project with source documentation that could not have been developed in the short time scale. However, the SGML instances did not contain all of the information required and the DTDs did not support all of the structures and data relationships that would make the system complete. The SGML and DTDs were part of a live system used to manage, control and publish documentation for many hardware systems and platforms. This meant that neither could be changed to accommodate the required WISDOM functionality. The project team decided to take the following approach:
 
  • supplementary DTDs were developed to support the additional information highlighted during the requirements phase.
  • supplementary instances would be linked to the original SGML using an attribute pairing;
  • relationships between instances that would result in navigation options in the system were captured in Excel (an example of this linking would be providing the users with links between a technical description of a piece of equipment to a maintenance procedure for that piece of equipment); and
  • additional DTDs were developed to capture new types of content (organisation and sub-surface information).
 
Once the content had been finalised, it was passed through a specially developed OmniMark script that:
 
  • combined the information keyed to the supplementary DTDs to the original sources;
  • created links inside and between SGML instances reflecting associations formed through original cross-references and through external configuration (the Excel spreadsheets); and
  • transformed the SGML to HTML, integrated with images, animation, and image maps.
 
While the solution taken was technically successful, it was found that the content of the original source SGML did not always match the granularity of data that was required for WISDOM. The project team found that some of the technical descriptions instances contained descriptions of many rather than individual equipment items. The team also found content describing the same piece of equipment spread across several instances. This illustrates that it is vital to ensure the quality of the structure of the authoring, not just the technical content. SGML allows structures to be defined but it does not, of course, ensure that the content in these structures is compatible with the DTD designer's original intentions.
 
 

The WISDOM System
 
 

Content
 
The project team decided to base the main data structures, content, and navigation for the system on a previous project Ajaib (see SGML Europe 1997 proceedings). The Ajaib and WISDOM systems, utilise the Shell Expro Corporate Management System which explains the relationship between the organisation (who), the processes executed (what) and the hardware assets (where) on which the activities are performed (see figure 2).

 
Shell CMS\\WISDOM Navigation logo

 
 
The information provided by the system consists of asset information (e.g., equipment descriptions for specific platforms, pipelines and systems), organisation information (e.g., description of personnel and their responsibilities), and activity information (e.g., descriptions of production tasks that technicians perform each day). Furthermore, the system also contains text, graphics, and animation describing the history and geology of the sub-surface reservoir. While the technicians do not normally require a detailed knowledge of the reservoir, this information will provide a greater understanding of the strategic decisions taken by onshore staff and will provide them with the knowledge they require to communicate more freely with the onshore staff. This knowledge may also support the empowerment philosophy of Shell, allowing the offshore staff to take informed decisions.
 
 

Performance Information
 
The aim of WISDOM is to provide knowledge to end users to allow them to run the Water Injection System at an optimal level. It is therefore vital to provide the users with performance information to show them the results of their actions. The integration of textual information with hardware and business performance data allows staff to see the benefits of executing activities in line with procedures and creatively think about new ways of performing tasks. The understanding by staff of their capability to contribute to the bottom line and having means to see their knowledge and experience being captured is an essential prerequisite to create an empowered workforce. Earlier versions of WISDOM, which did not yet have the functionality offered by OpenText Livelink (see later) demonstrated that the concept indeed results in business benefits. As a result of the introduction of the previous system, the consumption of a certain chemical was reduced by a factor of 6, 'simply' by allowing staff to see the business impact of following procedures and getting insight in business results not normally known to them.
 
This was accomplished by providing live graphs in WISDOM showing the performance figures for the Water Injection System. Reports are run automatically on Shell's production databases with the results being FTP'd to the WISDOM server. The resulting files are then converted into graphs and integrated into the WISDOM system.
 
 

Navigation
 
The main navigation for the system is provided via a series of hierarchical image maps. The main home screen icon (see figure 2) allows the user to enter the asset, organisation, and procedure sections of the system or to navigate to the platform performance graphs (see later). Simple image maps were created as GIF images allowing the user to click on a clearly marked portion of an image, taking them either to a piece of documentation or to the next image map in the hierarchy (see figure 3).

 
Organisation Navigation

 
 
For more complex image maps, where the borders of each "clickable portion" were less clear, the team decided to use animated illustrations. In an animated image map, when the user rolls the mouse over a component of the image map, the information displayed changes to help the user decide whether or not they should click to proceed (see figure 4).

 
Animated Image Map Examples

 
 
 

Use Of Livelink
 
Livelink provided the WISDOM team with a web-based information search and delivery system for the main SGML content (now held as HTML).
 
An important feature of the new system is the opportunity for staff to participate in discussion groups. This collaboration is focused at achieving commonly understood business goals and creating a knowledge foundation for further business improvement. An important part of the envisaged success of this new way of working is that all staff involved has access to the same information. It is viewed that knowledge management in an operational type of environment will not work if there is not a high element of shared information. It is typically this feature where benefits are seen from OpenText Livelink allowing access to controlled SGML content and non-controlled work documents (memos, reports, etc.). Furthermore the realisation by staff that they are working in a 'virtual' team, contributes to new ways of working and thought patterns which are core to the current transformation of Shell Expro. The functionality provided by the collaboration system is thought to improve the communication gap between on and offshore. With the availability of photos of all staff involved, their CVs and personal access to a shared web-based system, an IT solution has been created that enables far better intimacy and communication then presently achieved by e-mail or telephone.
 
The Wisdom team utilised the document management features of the system in two ways:
 
  • to control the versioning and access to the converted SGML information; and
  • to allow team members to contribute their own documents and reports to the system.
 
The latter functionality is unusual in a document delivery environment. Typically, technical documentation browsers allow the user to create private or public annotations to the original source. Livelink allows the users of WISDOM to add completely new content (such as hints and tips or performance reports) that are either too dynamic or are unsuitable for inclusion in the main content of the system.
 
 

Integration of WISDOM and Livelink
 
The project team decided to enhance Livelink to allow the WISDOM content to be integrated seemlessly into the finished system (see figure 5).

 
The WISDOM Home Page in Livelink

 
 
These enhancements allowed users to enter, search and navigate the WISDOM content without using features of the Livelink system more traditionally connected with document management (e.g. a file manager type interface). A further enhancement has allowed the user to associated WISDOM content with discussion group threads. One use of this feature would be to allow the user to start a discussion referring to information held in the WISDOM content. If the users feel that a standard procedure could be enhanced, they can simply create a discussion thread to discuss the issues with their colleagues (who may work on different shifts in different locations). Once the users have decided that the content should be changed, a request to update the standard documentation can be sent to the relevant personnel using the Workflow features available in the system. Users would be informed as to the status of their request as the Workflow progresses.
 
 

Current Status
 
Following the completion of the technical content of the system and the interface design, the system is now being implemented. It is realised that the introduction of a new way of working has to be carefully planned and is to be accompanied by significant change management effort. Staff will be trained in the use of the system and the business benefits of the system will be closely monitored. Core to the success of the system will be the confidence of the users that the knowledge they are willing to share is contributing to the increased performance of the system and results in higher rewards. The business performance incentive scheme of Shell Expro supports this approach.
 
The progress made in 90 days was only possible given the dedication of the project team and the input of the end-users to the design and data gathering for the system. While the use of original SGML documentation provided some problems, it would have been impossible to develop the re-used content in the project timeframe.
 
 

Future Enhancements
 
Future enhancements to the WISDOM concept will be focused on bringing the information to the work site where it is really required. This will involve the application of so called wearable computers (see figure 6). As stand alone units or connected to a server via a radio link, the technician will be able to access and process information, which will allow him to take performance improving measures on the spot where he observes discrepancies from ideal operating conditions. These types of applications offer new challenges related to:
 
  • communication infrastructures and the introduction of the 'walking client';
  • cultural issues related to staff not used to carrying around PCs;
  • different methodologies for how to assess what an operator really needs at the work site; and
  • interface design in relation to touch screen, screen size, usability.

 
Technician With Wearable Computer

 
 
The main architectural development that could be performed to support these enhancements, would be to remove the addition of style from the conversion process. This could be accomplished by the addition of XML/XSL support to the Shell approved browsers, allowing the WISDOM data delivery process to tailor the data content and style to the requirements of the user and the presentation device. It may also be possible to use XML to capture, store and deliver performance data. This would facilitate a fuller integration between numerical performance data and explanatory content.
 
 

Conclusions
 
One of the greatest successes so far has been the team approach towards building the solution. This has received much appreciation from all involved and has so far resulted in a high degree of ownership with the end-users. Another element, which proved to be important and stimulating was the realisation that the project and its deliverables should be 'fun'. This is reflected in the 'non-business like' structure in which the information is presented and used.
 
It is hoped that WISDOM will become a vital tool in Shell Expro Production Operations, providing essential knowledge in a unique team-orientated environment.
 
Acknowledgments
    WISDOM and the information management and presentation concepts in its present form is the result of a number of years of development and earlier versions have been presented during SGML Asia '96 in Singapore and SGML Europe#97 in Barcelona. The development would have not been possible without the excellent co-operation between Shell UK Exploration and Production, Shell International Exploration and Production, DPSL and ODL. Especially Paula Leenheer (SIEP) and Hans Le Fever (Brunei Shell Petroleum) are acknowledged for their support and never ending enthusiasm. Both authors acknowledge their respective companies for the opportunity to develop the WISDOM concept.
Packaging methods: what's the problem?   Table of contents   Indexes   XML is not just another name for SGML. XML is the vehicle to deploy structured data systems throughout an organization