Reinventing the maritime IT department – and why it can’t come soon enough

The trip to Athens and the DigitalShip conference was time well spent. Not only was the affair free from score-settling and rabble rousing, it had a practical programme reflecting the state of the maritime IT industry and looking at where it has to go in future.

I began the week by asking here why we didn’t spend enough thinking about the future and pondering what is coming next. As the Athens event drew to a close it became increasingly obvious that something similar is needed – and is beginning to happen – in IT departments across the shipping industry.

What we seem to have, to judge by the conference chairs and the speakers and panellists they introduced, is a lack of vision and a focus on the wrong things. In a time approaching crisis for the shipping industry, that needs to change.

First day chair Giampiero Soncini of SpecTec is a man not short of opinions and he had a few pearls to share. Rather cheekily observing that none of shipping companies that had gone bust of the last two years were SpecTec customers, he sounded a warning shot for maritime IT vendors and users alike.

Shipping he said, was the only industry where the IT department believed it could build procurement systems in house. Not strictly true. I’m told my previous employer wasted millions on a half-implemented/half home-grown SAP project and even suggested in all seriousness that they could build an editorial publishing system for a web and hard copy daily newspaper until we told them they needed counselling.

Don’t try and build anything yourself, Soncini said, you will achieve about one fourth of what you want and the costs will be astronomical. If you don’t already have a properly organised IT management system your chances of survival are slim and make sure your IT supplier will be around in a few years to support you.

Beluga Shipping, erstwhile supporter of ‘revolutionary’ SkySails had 77 ships and still went bust – in part he claimed because it had no managed IT programme and no filing system. Soncini supported the ‘small savings add up’ philosophy, but what small means is in the eye and on the budget of the beholder.

IT is a weapon that needs to be put in use but Soncini there is still too much focus on obtaining savings rather than adding value. Shipmanagers and IT departments get so little face time with owners because they and their work are not seen as strategic to the businesses success – a huge mistake.

He also took a swipe at the tendency among IT managers to point out that they could do more of anything if only the bandwidth was cheaper.

There is a need for ‘real broadband at a real fixed rate’ he said but IT managers needed to stop focussing on airtime costs and start contributing to creating savings and adding value. Some 90% of time was spent complaining about airtime cost, 10% on gaining operational efficiencies.

Arguing the toss over $1,000 of airtime was ‘pathetic’ when shipping companies are wasting thousands annually on inventory and spending millions on inefficient bunker fuel procurement, he said.

IT must do more, he suggested and there was plenty that could be done, when savings of 0.1-3% could make the difference between operational life and death.

That the IT department can do more is obvious but it was Deloitte’s Alexandros Charvalios in his presentation on security threats who reminded the tech guys that saying you don’t have the budget was the easy way out. Management, he said, might understand communications but not managing security – the users had to make them aware and allow them to take responsible.

AMMITEC’s Katarina Raptaki summed up the proceedings in a characteristically blunt way. The evidence was clear from the need to provide solutions for an increasingly complex world. The IT department needed to get out of its bunker and forge links with the operations and chartering departments

Visionaries were needed in the IT department to both save and make money –in fact the whole role of the IT department needed to redefined. Just as urgent was the need for the IT department  to understand broader shipping world and to gain rapid experience in other business areas and become more integrated with other departments.

Easy to say and harder to do but here was a real rallying call – a mission the whole industry could get behind, in the Agora of cultured debate and reasoning.