The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) is turning the tide against a technology-centric approach to service management in an attempt to enhance the understanding between business and the IT department.

“The MCA has always been technology-led, and for many years the thinking was system-centric, but about two-and-a-half years ago we began striving for excellence in service,” says Matthew Rumble, head of IT service delivery at the organisation.

The MCA is responsible for implementing the government’s maritime safety policy and for co-ordinating search and rescue at sea, managing about 16,000 emergency cases a year, as well as checking that ships meet UK and international safety rules.

When lives are at stake, ensuring the best possible IT service for users on the frontline takes on a whole new meaning.

“We are the fourth emergency service. Professionals just want to be able to report a technical problem and get it fixed; they don’t give a damn about why it has gone wrong,” says Rumble.

“They are not going to report faults in the middle of an incident if they are dealing with something potentially life-threatening and have an IT problem running alongside. They need to know they can rely on us and we need to be able to communicate with them in their language and understand the pressures they are under.”

The MCA has 19 rescue co-ordination centres around the UK coast, from Aberdeen to Falmouth. A top priority is the resilience of critical systems, catering for integrated coastguard communications, automatic identification, navigation warning and incident management.

“High availability of information and communication systems is crucial. Our strap line – ‘Safer lives, safer ships, cleaner seas’ – reflects the fact that, should we hear a mayday message, we sort it out,” says Rumble.

“For example, we have a well-planned mobile patch into radio so if a cruise ship passenger is injured and the ship radios us, we can phone the hospital and patch through via a radio link – similar to setting up a conference call. However, we had customer gripes about usability, such as fat fingers for buttons and error messages, which we wanted to address.”

The need to be seen to be performing well for the business, and to be at the forefront of best practice, led to the adoption of a service management approach and use of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework.

“We had a variety of specialist systems and technical people talking to professionals in a way that did not mean much to them. Saying a system had a certain number of faults is meaningless, but if you can say the coastguard stations were able to execute search and rescue missions with all the systems required 95.9 per cent of the time, it means something,” says Rumble.

“A service-centric approach means you can move towards defining services in user speak so they can measure business benefits. For the IT team, it allows us to look at a component as part of a wider service to see what needs to be done.”

The service approach will have an impact on service level agreements (SLAs) and make settings more relevant. But Rumble points out that SLAs can appear inappropriate with a system-centric approach.

For example, if a coastguard station cannot log on to a PC, an SLA stating it should be fixed by the end of the day might be met. But in business terms, IT service would be poor if fundamental desktop systems – such as the search and rescue planning system – could not be accessed during the day.

“A service-centric approach recognises that key systems rely on the desktop and ensures a fix is done in hours rather than a day,” says Rumble.

The MCA is developing a service catalogue, after the IT team attended an ITIL course. It will take time before the catalogue is complete, but Rumble says the approach will eventually ensure that everyone is on the same wavelength.

“You need ITIL so you can talk in the customer’s language and make no assumptions about what is understood. We talk in their terms on a business level,” he says.

“You must also take what you need from best practice recommendations and not get caught up in one approach. We have used Prince2, the standard UK government method for project management, to help implement best practice.”

Rumble believes the IT team’s position will be strengthened by improving service levels and creating a service management strategy. “Because of the specialist nature of what we do, systems are designed in-house and heavily customised. They would be difficult to support externally,” he says.

“A service approach may underpin outsourcing, as it is the basis of key agreements, but it also flows from insourcing because the IT team can prove the benefit to the business in understandable terms, such as uptime of key systems and money saved by being effective.”

Communication between the IT service desk and the business has already improved, says Rumble.

“When a customer phones through to report a fault, you must be aware they have probably spent 15 to 20 minutes trying to work the problem out themselves. By the time they come to you there is already a business impact in terms of time,” he says.

“You have to ask them basic questions, such as whether or not they have switched a system on, but in a way that does not teach them to suck eggs or boil with rage.”

Dealing with complaints is just one part of the equation, however. And fixing a problem before it becomes a serious issue is the other priority for Rumble and his team. The organisation, for example, has a high level of redundancy for key systems.

Rumble says technology is also helping to identify problems before they have a major impact, particularly the decision to deploy service level management company Nimsoft’s Nimbus system. The technology helps the MCA monitor the performance of IT infrastructure and major applications.

“We are using Nimbus service monitoring to manage the systems that run over Windows servers. Originally, Nimbus was introduced by our support partner Arqiva as a systems management tool to monitor our key ship monitoring system, the channel navigation information service,” he says.

“But we saw the benefit of deploying the technology corporate-wide, as part of a service approach to monitor crucial components of systems that could feed into availability statistics for services, and help identify pinch points.”