First, Brown assumes that a certain number of unpredictable events will happen in a given year. For example, some refineries will shut down for some period because of fires or hurricane damage. Brown looks at refinery histories to calculate an average outage, then sets his model to account for it. "We have said that all these unusual events that have occurred in past are going to occur on average in the future as they have in the past," he explains.

What Brown's model can't account for is politics. There's no way to calculate an average impact of country leaders acting erratic—something the $214 billion Chevron must deal with. About 26 percent of its proven oil reserves are in Kazakhstan, the company says. Kazakhstan isn't the most stable of countries. It broke off from Russia in 1991 and is now ruled by a president granted lifetime powers and immunity from criminal prosecution.

Chevron does not comment on the security of company personnel or operations, according to a spokesman, Sean Comey. However, in its latest annual report, Chevron lists the Kazakhstan operation under the warning "Political instability could harm Chevron's business."

From Wildcat to Datacrat

No one argues that oil isn't one heck of a lucrative industry. And all those profits don't come from good business intelligence practices alone. But it's a powerful notion to run a company with the mind-set that virtually every employee is a data analyst.

"Engineers and geoscientists and everyone have been taught BI from the start," says Lensing, the Hess CIO. Give people in any industry access to information along with tools to interpret the past, model the future and imagine different paths between the two, he says, and they can change the trajectory of companies.