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Marine operators software rubric

Whether you use internal or external software products to manage and evolve your operations, your tool choices dictate how fast you can respond to changes in the natural, business, and regulatory environment.

This guide is intended to help you assess software used to manage data and assets on and in the water. Marine research and industry have suffered through decades of low-quality software that is hard to use, and locks people into specific ecosystems.

Moving forward, we hope marine operators will demand more from companies selling software products, and will coordinate with each other to develop and cultivate platforms for information sharing. This is an old idea, with a name, platform collectives.

To evaluate a product, you will need access to the full software suite, or a representative demo. You should never make a decision without trialing it first, as many design flaws are difficult to spot from feature lists and screenshots.

It is fine if you don't understand some of the criteria! Just skip it, the rubric is not a quantitative tool, which is why these are true/false statements. Existing products may only check a few boxes.

Getting it done

Merits

  • You can do the same things more easily that you could before
  • Front-end consumes an API that can be accessed by third party services
  • The product integrates with any tools you use, or plan to use
  • The product or service is available offline
  • You want to use the tool every day forever
  • Ontology can adapt to new processes and scenarios
  • Abstractions of processes and things are meaningful to operators
  • Data and analytics services follow a(ny) standard

Loving your interface

Choosing tools which do not take accessibility into mind will make it harder to hire people to use it in the future.

Merits

  • Content and visual media help understand and use the product or service
  • Written materials have few errors
  • Text is in a standard and consistent format
  • Uses sans serif font
  • The background and foreground are contrasting colors
  • Red and green do not indicate important information
  • Your collaborators speak the same languages as the tool
  • You can imagine any employee regularly using the product
  • Multi-selection inputs are easy to understand
  • Form inputs are validated before submitted
  • Labels and placeholders provide useful guidance
  • Text forms allow auto-complete and fuzzy matching

Keeping your secrets safe

Software can be your competitive advantage, but it can expose to risk and invalidate practices you used previously to maintain trade secrets.

Merits

  • SSL is kept up to date
  • Data are encrypted at rest and in transit
  • Registration requires a strong password
  • Passwords are only ever accessed by the account holder
  • Provides two-factor authentication
  • Your rights to your data are clear
  • The developer will not own copies of your data without consent
  • Provider makes it easy to ex-filtrate your data or stop service at any time for any reason
  • There are no back doors for the developers

Getting help

Read the manual. Can you do self-service troubleshooting based on the technical and support documentation alone? Maybe there is a user community that you can go to for extra help. The truth is though, no everyone is outgoing or has the time to track down info. In those cases, you'll want to be able to reach support. If support is not in your language or time zone, or if you are a small fry that doesn't warrant the trouble, you'll be on your own.

Merits

  • Support is available in your time zone
  • A team supports the product
  • Support is provided by the creator of the product
  • Support cost is transparent
  • The company uses formal code review and quality control
  • Source code is available
  • Documentation includes a diagram or explanation of how database models are related
  • There is self-service documentation, external to the application

Respecting your rights

Read the license, or the End User License Agreement. It's probably a standard thing. For a mobile application that costs a few dollars that is OK. For bespoke software costing hundreds or thousands of dollars per month, that is going to help run your operation and keep you people safe, it is entirely appropriate to negotiate the terms.

Merits

  • You own the data you put into the system
  • You can make changes to the code
  • You can provide secure access to data for third parties
  • Terms are governed by accessible courts
  • The reverse engineering clause will not prevent you from using or making tools you need
  • Non-compete clauses have geographic and time boundaries

Working in the field

Maps and charts are an important part of life on the water. Tools with good geospatial data visualization features will make you life easier. Most mapping software is intended for 2D land applications.

Merits

  • The style of the map is adapted to a marine setting
  • Satellite and aerial imagery is off by default
  • You can find locations with and without coordinates or names
  • The projection of the web map is not distorted at your latitude
  • There is no additional cost for connectivity
  • Runs on any mobile device in the field