Strong digital foundations begin with clarity. Before dashboards, integrations, or automation can deliver value, organisations must address basic questions about data reliability, ownership, and governance. As regulatory pressure increases, these fundamentals are no longer optional. This insight explores why reliable data governance is critical as regulatory demands and automation increase across maritime operations.
Maritime technology programmes often focus on integration and dashboards, without addressing the real problems, which usually stem from earlier parts of the process.
When information is entered manually, copied between systems, or created in different ways by different teams, multiple versions of the same information quickly appear. This increases the risk of error, making it harder for teams to trust the data and even harder to rely on automation.
What ‘good’ looks like cannot be defined by a single team or function. If different teams each optimise for their own view of the data, the organisation as a whole becomes slower and less resilient.
Steven van den Haak, Digital Transformation Lead at SMT Shipping, explained how poor data quality becomes more visible when systems are connected and automation increases.
“At first, people say, ‘Your dashboard is wrong,’ but then you show them that the source system is wrong. When systems start feeding each other without human intervention, data quality suddenly becomes critical.”
As a result, strong digital foundations should begin with basic questions surrounding data being addressed. The first step is understanding what data exists and whether it can be trusted.
Senior Director, IT and Financial Systems at a global maritime company underlined the need to ask simple but often unanswered questions, like “what data do we have, how reliable is it, where does it come from, who owns it, and who is responsible for maintaining it.”
The importance of getting this process right is growing in the context of shipping facing more formal data requirements. Since 1 January 2023, IMO EEXI and CII rules have made it mandatory for ships to calculate energy efficiency metrics and collect and report annual carbon intensity data.
Weak internal data handling quickly becomes a compliance issue rather than a small internal inconvenience.
In Europe, there is even greater pressure. EMSA’s summary of the EU ETS extension shows how quickly reporting and compliance obligations increase over a short period of time, and FuelEU Maritime introduces additional requirements around measuring and reducing greenhouse gas intensity.
Regardless of a company’s commercial strategy, the ability to explain and evidence emissions performance depends on data that is properly governed and able to stand up to scrutiny.
Digital maturity should be less about scale and more about consistency.
Download ‘Future-Ready Shipping: The importance of strong digital foundations’ commissioned by Sedna, and discover how shipping companies can move from fragmented, inbox-reliant workflows to resilient, data-driven operations.
