Company Magazine for the Odfjell Group - April 2008

Focus on ICT supportICT arranges the first global user-supportseminar in BergenBy Matt Duke and Harald SteinDuring Week 3 this year, the ICT departmentin Bergen ran an “InternationalSupport Seminar” for ICT support stafffrom Bergen, Rotterdam, Singapore,Houston and Manila. The purpose ofthe five-day course was to provide allICT support technicians with informationand training so that they could betterunderstand our systems and policiesand ultimately provide world class serviceto our customers, i.e. all Odfjell users.For Odfjell to get the best return oninvestment from our ICT infrastructure,it is very important that the remotesupport teams are fully trained on thesystems they support, and understandthe reasons why these were deployedin the first place.The seminar was split into four “tracks”or themes: ICT Standards, Organisation& Infrastructure, ICT Ship Support,ICT Communications & Operations andICT Applications. We offered 26 separatesessions to cover various aspectsof these themes, all with a particularemphasis on interactivity and active involvementby the participants. It is veryimportant for us to get feedback fromthe remote ICT staff, and the week endedwith “Chalk and Talk” sessions wherewe brainstormed and decided on actionpoints around the main topics of “Documentation,ICT Tools and Security”.also has a pivotal role in informing theBergen ICT staff if systems are not performingto an acceptable level. Thus,the feedback and brainstorming inputduring the seminar was very valuableto us.The seminar was also an opportunityto present the new “Operations OnCall” solution. From February 2008 theICT department not only provides userswith a 24/7/365 support service, butthe ICT staff themselves have their ownnumber to call in emergencies where amember of the back end ICT Operationsteam will respond at any time to anysystem emergencies.At the same time the monitoring systemshave over four hundred proactivetests, and should any of these fail anSMS will be sent to the “On Call” teamfor immediate investigation. In a companythat now runs ICT systems globallyin 18 countries it is very important thatthe necessary expertise is available nomatter what time zone. The ICT supportstaff reacted very positively to this, asit will allow them to provide a higherlevel of service to their regions.It was also very encouraging that HSE& Quality Manager Bjørn Ydse madethe time to join Arne Sletten Helgesen’spresentation on Docmap. It was a goodopportunity for him to present our mainQA system, and he encouraged the ICTstaff to leverage the best out of it.The rapid growth of the company hasled to a high management focus onproviding high availability world classsystems for our users. Therefore wegreatly appreciate the feedback wereceive through our annual ICT surveyand from user comments directed to ICTSupport. Our goal is to provide the bestuser experience possible, and we hopethat training events like this ICT supportseminar will improve lines of communicationsand ultimately give the end usera better quality of service, whilst alsoimproving our ICT staffs’ work satisfaction.ICT Bergen would like to thank everybody,both participants as well as theeleven speakers, for their time and attention.Even though it rained for thewhole week we hope our guests enjoyedtheir stay in Norway.We have put much effort into streamliningour systems and standards so thatthe company can use its global positionto leverage the best price on ICT infrastructurecomponents, and use “Best inClass” technologies, aiming for 99.99%uptime. However, without the efforts ofour ICT support staff, the users will notbe given the correct guidance in howto best use the systems. ICT supportSome of the seminar participants during one of the sessionsOdfjell Quarterly April 2008 29