Organizing for digital success

You already know high frequency data from your vessel will be important for you to stay competitive, both from an operational as well as an environmental perspective. You also know that to succeed long term, you have to put data at the heart of your operations, becoming a data driven organization.

Building a data driven organization and operation is of course dependent on making the right technological choices. You need to ensure you can start sharp and small, delivering rapid value to prove the viability of the digitalization initiative. You also need to ensure you can grow, scaling across a heterogenous fleet while serving a wide variety of use cases and data needs. This is no small task although there are ways to reduce the risk. The benefits of getting it right are crucial to stay ahead with increasing demands from owners, banks, customers and regulators.  

 There is one more, often overlooked, factor which will ultimately be the make or break of your initiative; people.

But there is one more, often overlooked, factor which will ultimately be the make or break of your initiative; people. Firstly, you need to organize your digitalization initiative, the project, right, in order to deliver the expected results. Secondly, you need to organize your operations right to sustain them over time. Let´s look at what this means in practice.

The project organization matters

Most importantly, you need a clear owner of your digitalization initiative, who ultimately can make decisions, fund the project while also keeping the long-term perspective and holistic view of what benefits can be realized. This is often a C-level role, to ensure the necessary authority and clear mandate. Without this, the initiative will often be short lived, too small in scale to deliver real value and falter at the first hurdle.

In addition to the project owner, a day-to-day project manager will also be needed to ensure internal complexities and friction are handled, while driving for progress. To ensure alignment and broad anchoring, the key functions should be represented in the project and steering groups. Key functions are typically technical and operational departments, innovation teams and IT, but the initiative can include other functions and departments as well.

The better understood and anchored the project is, the easier the implementation and roll out phase. More importantly, the better anchored, the easier the operational phase becomes.

Data driven means doing things differently.

After having realized your vessel digitalization project, you will find yourself in a situation where you have data from your vessels, you have the analytics and insights and you have identified improvement areas and potential savings. Now you need to realize them, as well as to maintain the advantage you have built over time. This means operating differently. As an example, if you print your emails to read them, you lose the efficiency advantage of the digital format. This also goes for vessel operations. If you continue to operate them as you did before you had data, you will miss out on the advantage.

So now that you have data you will have to identify what activities you can stop doing, what activities you can do differently and what activities you must start doing. You have to change your processes to reflect the fact that you now have a much better data driven decision making foundation. This means that you need to change how your organization operates. This is why the anchoring in the project phase is so important; the more people understand how you can benefit from data, the easier it is to motivate and sustain the organizational change. It is not simple, but it becomes easier.

Technology alone is not a silver bullet but combining the right technology with the right people in the right way creates the foundation for long term success in becoming a data driven organization.

At Raa Labs, we have broad experience working with companies who are going through this transformation journey. Get in touch to learn how our technology solution, RaaEDGE, combines with our transformation experience can help you set the right course.