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RSS feedsIT Week: What does the Maritime and Coastguard Agency do?
Findlay: The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) is
responsible for maritime safety. It is the MCA’s job to co-ordinate all search
and rescue operations at sea through the coastguard and enforce the UK’s
shipping safety laws.
How does IT help with those responsibilities?
Our main duty is to support a network of 19 command and control centres around
the country, which are similar to police command centres, just focused on the
sea. We also operate an Anglo-French system for monitoring traffic in the
English Channel. It is well known that the Strait of Dover is one of the busiest
shipping routes in the world and we have to monitor over 400 commercial vessels
a day as well as a huge number of smaller craft.
What particular challenges does such an IT infrastructure throw
up?
The main consideration is that we are covering the entire coastline and an
offshore area of 1.25 million square miles. As a result, our radio sites are
very distributed and located in remote places, such as at the top of mountains
in the Scottish Isles. We, of course, need to maintain very, very high
availability even at these remote locations so that we can deliver services
without failures as you can imagine, that is a major managerial and technical
challenge.
How do you tackle that challenge?
Our primary task is the delivery of information and communication systems, and
as a result, we have focused very heavily on service management delivery. We
used to focus on system delivery and system management but we’ve realised it is
much better to look more broadly at service management and service level
management. Also, because we are, in effect, dealing with safety of life, we
have to take a very proactive approach to IT and service management.
How do system and service management differ?
Five or six years ago, our focus was on managing the systems and making sure
they were up. But now we have moved to a service management approach, which
means we have far greater discussions with our users about what IT they actually
require operationally. We find out what they want and what they regard as core
and then come up with operational agreements that underpin any of the SLAs
[service level agreements] we draw up with suppliers like BT.
How did you go about undertaking this transition?
As with systems management, you need to automate the management processes, so in
2003 we deployed NimBUS [a service level management and monitoring software
suite from Nimsoft] to monitor our Channel Navigation Information Service. We
deployed it as a systems management tool but it became apparent we could use it
to monitor SLAs with our users and our contractors. We are now rolling it out
across our infrastructure.
What do you feel this service management approach gives you?
The main metric of success is that availability has gone up. We are also far
more responsive. Before we deployed NimBUS we were very reliant on our IT
service suppliers providing information to us so that we could gauge their
performance. By deploying our own management tools we can monitor not just our
own systems but also third-party suppliers and whether or not they are meeting
their SLAs. This has allowed us to spot areas that were not as resilient as they
should have been and allowed us to provide evidence to the board to highlight
any problems far quicker. That means we can be much more proactive in the way we
manage systems, which gives the coastguard a level of comfort that we can detect
IT problems early and deal with them remotely, where possible.
Do you have any examples?
We have a very extensive radio network with 104 remote radio sites offering
point-to-point communication. We found that because it was a point-to-point
system if we had a failure due to weather we would have areas with no comm
unications. Now we have moved over to WAN-based communications, which has
allowed us to bring the cost down and improve availability. We have been able to
deploy equipment at remote sites far easier and make them available to more than
one rescue centre, which increases resilience.
What level of resilience are we talking about?
We have got radio availability up to 99.97 percent over the past year, which is
good if you consider the remoteness of a lot of the systems.
About James Findlay
James Findlay is head of ICT for the Maritime & Coastguard Agency
(MCA) and is responsible for the management and delivery of all ICT
infrastructure including HM Coastguard's UK radio and radar networks.
He has worked in the Marine Electrical and Electronics industry for 19 years both in the UK and overseas.
Before joining the MCA he was the senior technical manager at Marine & Ports Services in Bermuda.
See also:
All IT Management
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