Developing a Benefits Assessment Framework for Sea Traffic Management Systems

The maritime shipping industry is deeply rooted in history and tradition. Although it is one of the most important industries in today’s global world, digital transformation has so far not penetrated the entire industry but merely commenced in a few individual companies. The heavy reliance on manual information retrieval and the collaboration willingness of other actors pose great challenges to more efficient, safe, and sustainable operations. As nobody seems to see the ‘whole picture’, the industry is characterized by individual (sub-) optimization neglecting completely the significance of the optimization of the entire ecosystem as a whole. Conducting an empirical pilot study using triangulation and in-depth, semi-structured interviews, we carried out an analysis addressing the research question: How can potential benefits of the implementation of a sea traffic management system be evaluated? Based on a thorough review of the academic literature on IS benefits assessment and a profound understanding of the maritime transportation-ecosystem and the design of a sea traffic management, a framework for assessing IS benefits is developed. The pilot interviews revealed the robustness of the framework confirming and refining the dimensions of the framework.