Resumen del autor, extraído del trabajo. Information Technology (IT), technical computing and knowledge management techniques have enabled many of the transformations that the Petroleum Industry has been undergoing. IT, technical computing and knowledge management will rapidly fuse further, aided by exploding telecommunications bandwidth and increasing computing power, and will accelerate their role in adding greater value to the Petroleum Industry. Enormous amounts of additional information and data, from both inside and outside a company, will become available to become fused and personalized. To avoid information overload, intelligent agents will manage and filter it so that only the key person- and/or position- specific information is made available, when and where needed. Pre-filtered, integrated data sets will be brought to world-class geological experts for critical additional analysis and evaluation, to enhance finding oil and gas and for life-cycle reservoir optimization. Massive real-time optimization will be applied to manage the entire producing enterprise and manage the manufacturing and marketing enterprise. To provide maximum value, real-time optimization and control will require real-time data provided by new generation sensors and in-situ measurement devices. The business decision making will be supported by real-time knowledge management and IT systems that will source data from the entire value chain of the business. IT and technical computing will ultimately complete the transition from a data-sparse to a data-rich environment, and they will enable and even drive the further reductions in workforce required to run the business and will produce significant further productivity improvements. Virtual teams, continuous access to world-class experts, and the formation of the virtual knowledge enterprise will become the winning norm. In summary, IT and technical computing will, over time, modify the organization and nature of the business, as we know it.