Our colleagues in BP Amoco have clearly been putting in overtime recently to make the most of their new insights from working with the lab on Knowledge and Media.

There are already a number of Planet clones, designed by the lab for use in the Open University and for other clients and research communities eg. See John Domingues recent story about the UFI funded Marchmont News version of the Planet agent. But on a recent visit to the lab, the BP Amoco Well Intervention team were so taken by the KMi Planet that they decided that they should build their very own! David Stevens and Jonathan Paragreen had detailed discussions with the KMi Planet team to explore how they might re-engineer some features of the our news agent and add a few special features of their own!

Their own news agent called Drawdown is a forms based system implemented via a Cold Fusion server. It carries Well Performance related news posted by engineers in the well engineering community. Whilst Drawdown is missing the proactivity of the KMi agent is does have many of the media features which contribute to its communticative power. Amongst the new and vital features of the Drawdown news agent is an auto voting system so that readers can view the most popular stories (filtered using intranet authentication so that authors cannot popularize their own stories)! Users can also comment directly on stories – adding their own perspective to the Well performance reportage. Perhaps most vitally, it even features a dynamically generated posting of the current BP Amoco Share Price!

 

According to one manager in BP Amoco Exploration who was recently shown the Drawdown agent "I am impressed – probably one of the best of these that I’ve seen". The team will be evaluating the impact of the agent on their business communciation over the next few months, before returning to KMi to discuss future directions.