IT 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.