Is your organisation mature, emerging, foundational or visionary in its approach to digital? Based on the difficulty of implementation and the expected time to pay back the return on investment, one can categorise the use cases for digital transformation into the four maturity levels. The variety of use cases open to the organisation varies depending on its maturity level.
Foundational
This ship operator is in a nascent phase of adoption. The organisation may have started to explore digital technology opportunistically or passively, but there is no clearly defined digital strategy. Knowledge of digital use cases and enablers is incomplete or lacking depth. Operations and business functions are largely manual, with some digital functionality, and plans to digitalise further are vague or non-existent.
Foundational use cases
Emerging
This ship operator designed and shared a well-thought-out digital strategy, complete with a roadmap linking adoption with the wider goals of the business in the short, medium, and long terms. This organisation has already deployed digital technologies and embedded them into its operations, using them to drive efficiency, safety, compliance, and profitability. Enablers have been put in place, such as high-speed connectivity and cloud storage, but the organisation may still be reliant upon manual or legacy processes.
Emerging use cases
Mature
This ship operator at this level is a market leader in the use of digital technology and is constantly exploring new ways to innovate, iterate, and improve. This business has a firm grip on its digitalisation strategy, has a sophisticated roadmap, and is applying digital solutions to use cases across the spectrum of its business functions and operations. Crucially, this business’s strategy is joined up and its digital technologies consistently deliver advantages across multiple functions. Automation is extensive and intelligently applied. Moreover, there is a willingness to embrace continuous improvement, and this business understands that digitalisation is an ongoing commitment, rather than a one-time event. All of these use cases can be the source of exceptional performance improvement. But some of them can be the source of considerable wasted investment if deployed at an immature time. Your organisation’s level of digital maturity will be a key determinant in its ability to execute on each use case. Not every potential use case for digital technology has been explored here. But the method can be applied universally. By first understanding where your organisation is at you can find the use cases with the highest and fastest return on investment. This is the springboard that can justify the investment into the next phase of maturity.
Mature use cases
Visionary
The organisation is at the pinnacle of digital maturity, fully embracing advanced digital technologies like AI, Machine Learning, and IoT. These companies integrate predictive and prescriptive analytics into their operations, ensuring they can forecast trends and optimise processes with high accuracy. At this stage, digital transformation is critical to the business, deeply embedded into the company’s strategic planning. They operate with best in class data infrastructure, specifically designed to meet their unique needs, ensuring data governance is comprehensive and robust. The organisational culture is highly optimised, with digital technology seen as indispensable to success. There is a seamless connection between data teams and senior leadership, reinforcing the strategic importance of digital initiatives.
Visionary use cases
To explore the concept of benchmarking digital transformation in shipping and the importance of digital maturity, download our thought leadership report, produced in collaboration with Lloyd’s Register, The Benchmark: Measuring the Progress of Digital Transformation in Ship Operations. This report provides a deep dive into the journey towards digital maturity for maritime businesses. You can download a copy here.
