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Why the Maritime Industry Struggles when it comes to Tech Adoption

Dear Editor,

Firstly, I call this the “Maritime Innovation & Adoption Conundrum”. A huge gulf between Tech on one side and the Industry on the other side, is preventing innovative development and its adoption.

I generalise the causes into:

Skills Issues: On one side: Multi-disciplinary and wholesome skills are rare as due to the vast nature, most maritime jobs are specialized. On the other side, Tech lacks the domain understanding of its many operational variations, exceptions and nuances that are needed to solve ground people’s problems.

Trust Issues: the industry feels that IT has not delivered particularly with the seamless and ubiquitous UI/UXs they become so accustomed to on their mobile applications. On the other hand, Tech people feel that shipping people are unwilling to spend time & commit their effort in discussing their problems and requirements – so there is a lack of trust between them.

Mismatch Issues: even in instances where there is a lot of willingness, both sides have different perspectives, expectations and priorities – more so in the case of a CVC or Corporate Innovation structure. They still need an expert third party to bridge the gap.

Last but not least, it’s the very nature of maritime commerce itself. I will expand on this:
Try explaining the maritime industry succinctly and accurately and you will know why many describe it as a complex industry. This maritime nature includes: having numerous nodes, which are extensively diversified; involving long chain; with distributed flows – whether it is workflow or dataflow; and many tedious operations; often requiring remote management. Such basic nature creates challenges in: Simplification; Standardisation; Connectivity; Controllability; Efficiency and Predictability.

So, you see: the very nature of maritime actually hinders digitization! Ironically, these natural challenges are exactly what digitalisation aims to solve!

Secondly, the things that concern maritime people are often not the same things that Tech people look at solving. To succeed in any digitisation or innovation project, we will need to align such attitudinal difference first.

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Lastly, it is one of approach. Tech tends to take a direction and approach that somehow creates a defensive response from the industry people. The key inputs required for change have to come from the gatekeepers now themselves! Many of the Tech understanding and approach is also on container shipping, thus missing out on the majority shipping segments in bulk and breakbulk.

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How do we fair compared to other industries?

Many put the maritime industry in a negative light in terms of its pace in adopting new tech. I’d say this is at most half right. Some also like to highlight the inefficiencies referring to the many very manual marine operational activities. When I put on my venture capitalist’s hat, I see just as many startups and founders lamenting while trying to disrupt the other ‘inefficient’ banking, finance, insurance industries.

Many of these other industries suffer a similar conundrum. However, this is not to justify inaction from our part. As a matter of fact, since we are a reactive industry intersecting with several other industries like trade, finance, banking, logistics, insurance, etc. we need to know that our transformation is key to our staying relevant and prominent. There is a real risk of us being disrupted and becoming a marginalised industry good only for providing our hardware.

What’s my suggested solution?

That is the purpose of the explanations above. Understanding these problems is a good start to initiating any innovation project. Too often there is an under-estimation of the challenges resulting in failure to complete a project or its eventual adoption. My advice is to start with a small project and avoid using IT vendors who do not have good knowledge and experience in the business you are doing. There are also many offerings in the form of Software as a Service these days. These generally have a low monthly cost for usage and do not charge development costs so there is no risk of adopting something that does not work.

Experiment with such a process, and you will be able to understand the magnitude of change involved and the ability of your users to embrace such change. Also, any digitalisation projects should be cloud-based.

Yours Sincerely,

Chye Poh Chua,

Founder, ShipsFocus

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