Helen Mohan, an Information Technology expert with decades of experience across both aviation and maritime, is no stranger to digital transformation and has made significant strides in propelling her organisation into the 21st century and her organisation’s mission to secure a reliable internet connection onboard vessels. Today, Helen shares her experience.
The Digital Dark Age Of Maritime
Maritime, as an industry, is far behind its counterparts in a tech-by-tech comparison. With some organisations still using systems developed in the 90s. This digital dark age was Helen’s biggest challenge when entering the shipping industry: “We had Lotus Notes for our email… [Which] I haven’t used since the 80s or 90s… I didn’t even know it was still in existence.”
This is not a unique occurrence; many CIOs face similar challenges balancing the management of legacy systems alongside cutting-edge software. It takes time, resources and investments to bring shipping companies into the new age.
After modernising her organisation’s software and processes through a number of transformation projects, Helen set her sights on a much bigger project – vessel connectivity.
The Pursuit Of Connected Connectivity
The connectivity challenge wasn’t just about slow internet; it was consuming the entire IT team. “Our fleet IT engineers spent all of their time looking after the internet instead of improving the ship’s applications… Why should I have to pay my engineers to worry about the internet on a ship?”
Despite the many resources Helen’s IT department used to manage the internet, it was impossible to maintain a reliable service, “The internet’s going to go down’ whenever ships entered certain waters… It won’t work in China. It won’t work in Turkey. It won’t work in Russia.” More critically, Helen described patchy connectivity around ports, which forced crew to buy their own GSM connections just to maintain basic communication.
To Helen, the solution was obvious: “I want the internet to work wherever the ship is… I don’t want to be buying the equipment. I want [vendors] to provide it… Which meant that satellite and GSM technologies needed to be combined to provide an effective, affordable solution – we needed four levels of connectivity from LEO all the way down to GSM and I want that as a service.” The challenge then came to convince both her organisation to support her initiative and vendors to create this consolidated service offering – at an affordable price.
For IT innovators like Helen, change began through attending networking events, interacting with vendors, sharing her ideas and building an interest. However, it was not as easy as you’d think, “A lot of them didn’t get the concept for a long time – many just thought that this was an addition of Starlink to existing equipment”.
Like any transformation project, the biggest barrier is often the human element and its resistance to change.
Once implemented, the impact was profound: “They now have internet anywhere… It’ll fail over from Starlink into VSAT and if it needs to, it’ll go to GSM if it finds it so the ships are always connected.” This single project paved the way for other maritime satellite providers to start combining their services and this has now become a regular practice with leading suppliers offering this combined model.
Connected Vessels Giving Crew Identities
Advancements in connectivity have created a perfect opportunity to IT teams to examine crew applications and present the opportunity to finally give seafarers identities. “Now that you’ve got reliable connectivity, more and more innovations will come. It will be easier to implement mobile applications for your seafarers that will work anywhere – including your vessel, and your vessel will become a floating office”. But on a vessel, “Nobody has an identity, they have a role and that role rotates… This means that system activities cannot be fully tracked – That is a security risk”. Investing early in crew tracking will reduce headaches in the long run by supporting communication, risk management and vessel security.
This case study perfectly outlines how CIOs and IT teams can have a profound effect on the industry and shape vendor roadmaps. Meaningful change requires more than just an idea; it needs persistence, industry collaboration and pressure on vendors to understand the unique needs of the maritime industry.
