Commissioner of Irish Lights

With a legacy spanning over 200 years, the Commissioner of Irish Lights is committed to ensuring safe navigation at sea. Responsible for Maritime Aids to Navigation under the Safety of Life at Sea Convention, Irish Lights’ unique remit includes the provision and maintenance of over 340 general aids to navigation (lighthouses, buoys, beacons, etc), the superintendence of approximately 3,500 local aids to navigation and marking/removing dangerous wrecks around the coast.

With a strategic focus on the provision of next-generation navigation and maritime services, continual innovation resulted in the adoption and reliance on technology, data, and information systems. This combined with ongoing strategic and structural changes, process improvements, and new service offerings, led to a cross-functional review of business operations. The result, a multi-year Digital Transformation project that would leverage the Microsoft 365 platform to positively impact and benefit all employees through the enhancement of communication, collaboration, and knowledge management at Irish Lights.

With geographically dispersed teams, including some working at sea with limited accessibility, Irish Lights as part of their M365 Digital Transformation initiative sought to further enhance collaboration and communication across the organisation. The Lens, an intranet built on SharePoint, provides Irish Lights with a central solution for all corporate communications, providing an alternative and reducing the dependence on emails while enabling employees to stay connected regardless of physical location and across multiple devices. Similar to the document management system, clarity around governance ensures the longevity and integrity of the solution, with Orchestry, a best-in-breed governance management solution added to re-enforce and report on governance going forward.

Running in parallel to the technical and business analysis streams, there was a third stream, one focused on navigating the human side of technical change. This approach not only ensured clarity for employees at all stages of the project rollout but also provided an opportunity for employees to gain exposure to the new information structure and become familiar with it prior to migrating to the new document management solution.

With the completion of the Information Architecture redesign and the introduction of M365 solutions, Irish Lights is set to embark on the next stage of its digital transformation journey, with the adoption of increased process automation to deliver enhanced operational efficiency and improved employee experiences.