Taking a breather

摘要

It may have come later than in some other industries but IT in shipping and many associated software products, particularly in the broad ship management area, are now at a fairly mature stage of development. There is a lot of work going on in developing new products and improving old ones but how many of these are destined to survive is an open question. Consider the number of products littering the past decade. One of the main reasons why ship-ping lagged behind in computerisation of ship management functions was the cost of communications and the difficulty in transmitting data between ships and shore. Historically, ships' officers and crew have needed to be given a fair degree of autonomy in decision-making and purchasing of spares and stores because of their remote-ness from headquarters.