Managing a Floating System Via RSS
In a case of severe understatement, I read an article in CIO Asia magazine that quoted Wallem Shipping CIO Patrick Slesinger as saying:
“There’s enough problems controlling and managing IT infrastructure when you know precisely where it is,” says director and CIO Patrick Slesinger, “let alone when it is constantly moving at sea.”
Oh, yeah.
Wallem is a ship broker and ship management company with more than 8,000 employees in 21 countries. Wallem gives shippers full, on-line access to things like procurement records, accounting and personnel records for their ships. Patrick has developed quite a system to do so. He uses Attensa’s managed RSS platform to immediately notify employees, ship owners and service providers when their ships change their itinerary - due to weather, etc. That way, employees needing to work the ship would immediately know whether there would be a delay. And if service providers needed to change their plans, they’d know as well. It’s really quite an amazing system.
Four years ago, I worked for a company with the BC Ferries system as their client. They used RSS in a similar way. Because so many people in the BC area relied on the ferry system to get to work, people were able to subscribe to the BC Ferries web site and get service notices delivered to their PDA’s or email when ferries were delayed, etc.
One of the most innovative uses of RSS by BC Ferries was to constantly update how many people were waiting at the dock to board the ferries - you could always tell how full the ship was by how full the parking deck was. And every time a car passed through the parking gate, an attendant would send a count from her Blackberry to the web, where it was reflected in a graphic of how full the parking deck was. It was a very cool mashup (I actually just typed maship, which I rather like) at the time.
Somehow these shipping guys know how to use RSS to get the right information to the right people at the right time, no matter where the information originates. Like a rippling tide.
