Shipping Industry Leveraging Technology incredibly

 Anjan Deb GM-IT of “The Great Eastern Shipping    company”  say that the  Shipping industry is badly running behind the other industries, as the IT revolution that happened in last 2 decades was for industries operating on LAND, but not operating on SEA. The main reason was the remoteness of operation and issue of connectivity. Another major reason is that the people who manage ships remotely from shore have to spend their first 10-15 yrs of career on sea. So, after coming back to shore, it becomes a nightmare for them to adopt the new work style at the corporate environment using technology that has revolutionized in the last 10-15 years.
Therefore, a natural obstruction exists for them to adopt new technology. However there has been a significant progress happening in the IT usage in day-today business operations in the last few years. A huge transformation is happening because of introduction of new technologies like mobility, IoT, cloud etc. People are using IoT by fetching live data from ship and monitoring the passage of ship every moment, sitting at their desk. This is a massive transformation taking place for those people who used to take print out of their emails always.
Though we are not in consumer business but we always have a customer. They also start interaction for business with our people using net and collaborating with digitised documents etc.
The social media is definitely giving better customer engagement and also supplier engagement besides own organisation’s people. But there exists challenges like cyber security, privacy and maintenance of organisation’s confidentiality, information leakage etc. I think we will definitely find out the solutions of all challenges in near future, as one cannot stop technology to take over.”