I recently figured out where Agile lives. Or at least where we strive to live. We live on the isthmus — the thin sliver of land — between the world of data science and the domain of the subsurface.

We’re not alone. A growing number of others live there with us. There’s an encampment; I wrote about it earlier this week.

Backman’s Island, one of my favourite kayaking destinations, is a passable metaphor for the relationship between machine learning and our scientific domain.

Closing the gap in your organization

In some organizations, there is barely a connection. Maybe a few rocks at low tide, so you can hop from one to the other. But when we look more closely we find that the mysterious and/or glamorous data science team, and the stories that come out of it, seem distinctly at odds with the daily reality of the subsurface professionals. The VP talks about a data-driven business, deep learning, and 98% accuracy (whatever that means), while the geoscientists and engineers battle with raster logs, giant spreadsheets, and trying to get their data from Petrel into ArcGIS (or, help us all, PowerPoint) so they can just get on with their day.

We’re not going to learn anything from those organizations, except maybe marketing skills.

We can learn, however, from the handful of organizations, or parts of them, that are serious about not only closing the gap, but building new paths, and infrastructure, and new communities out there in the middle. If you’re in a big company, they almost certainly exist somewhere in the building — probably keeping their heads down because they are so productive and don’t want anyone messing with what they’ve achieved.

Here are some of the things they are doing:

Blending data science teams into asset teams, sitting machine learning specialists with subsurface scientists and engineers. Don’t make the same mistake with machine learning that our industry made with innovation — giving it to a VP and trying to bottle it. Instead, treat it like Marmite: spread it very thinly on everything.*
Treating software like knowledge sharing. Code is, hands down, the best way to share knowledge: it’s unambiguous, tested (we hope anyway), and — above all — you can actually use it. Best practice documents are I’m afraid, not worth the paper they would be printed on if anyone even knew how to find them.
Learning to code. OK, I’m biased because we train people… but it seriously works. When you have 300 geoscientists in your organization that embrace computational thinking, that can write a function in Python, that know what a support vector machine is for — that changes things. It changes every conversation.
Providing infrastructure for digital science. Once you have people with skills, you need people with powers. The power to install software, instantiate a virtual machine, or recruit a coder. You need people with tools, like version control, continuous integration, and communities of practice.
Realizing that they need to look in new places. Those much-hyped conversations everyone is having with Google or Amazon are, admittedly, pretty cool to see in the extractive industries (though if you really want to live on the cutting edge of geospatial analytics, you should probably be talking to Uber). You will find more hope and joy in Kaggle, Stack Overflow, and any given hackathon than you will in any of the places you’ve been looking for ‘innovation’ for the last 20 years.

This machine learning bandwagon we’re on is not about being cool, or giving keynotes, or saying ‘deep learning’ and ‘we’re working with Google’ all the time. It’s about equipping subsurface professionals to make better and safer scientific, industrial, and business decisions with more evidence and more certainty.

And that means getting serious about closing that gap.

I thought about this gap, and Agile’s place in it — along with the several hundred other digital subsurface scientists in the world — after drawing an attempt at drawing the ‘big picture’ of data science on one of our courses recently. Here’s a rendering of that drawing, without further comment. It didn’t quite fit with my ‘sliver of land’ analogy somehow…