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Jess Panni By Jess Panni Principal I
Wardley Maps - Explaining how OceanMind use Microsoft Azure & AI to combat Illegal Fishing

One of the main challenges our customers encounter when migrating their systems to Azure, is how to think about benefits and trade offs needed to get maximum value from the re-platforming. Wardley maps has proven to be an invaluable tool to provide everyone with a clear vision of the end goal and the journey on how to get there.

I'm a huge fan of Wardley mapping which is a wonderfully intuitive and effective means of communicating, exploring and collaborating on strategy. One of the main challenges our customers encounter when migrating their systems to Azure is how to think about benefits and trade offs needed to get maximum value from the re-platforming. Wardley maps has proven to be an invaluable tool to provide everyone with a clear vision of the end goal and the journey on how to get there.

This particular project centred on the challenge of solving illegal fishing which is having a devastating impact on the biodiversity of the world's oceans. Up to a third of all fish stocks are under threat which has serious consequences for both the environment and the health and livelihoods of people around the world. OceanMind are an organisation whose mission is to solve this problem. They do this by collecting billions of data points and use AI and machine learning to detect illegal fishing activity which they supply for law enforcement and compliance. Like many organizations, their aging on-premise systems were struggling to keep up with ambitions. As featured at Microsoft Future Decoded 2019, OceanMind with the help of endjin, embarked on a migration to Microsoft Azure.

During the project we applied Wardley maps to explain and justify the move to a serverless computing fabric. The maps also highlight some really interested and important consequences for the architecture. I've put together a short video which walks through a handful of the more interesting maps.

If you haven't come across Wardley mapping before and are keen to learn more, I strongly recommend reading Simon Wardley's excellent eBook on the subject.

Why not have a go at mapping your own digital transformation strategy? I'd love to see what you come up with. Feel free to send your maps to hello@endjin.com.

OceanMind featured in Future Decoded 2019 Keynote with Lucas Joppa.

OceanMind featured in Future Decoded 2019 Keynote with Lucas Joppa.

Howard van Rooijen

OceanMind featured in Microsoft's Chief Environment Officer, Lucas Joppa's Keynote at Future Decoded 2019.
Recording of Azure Oxford talk on combatting illegal fishing with Azure (for less than £10/month)

Recording of Azure Oxford talk on combatting illegal fishing with Azure (for less than £10/month)

Carmel Eve

Jess and Carmel recently gave a talk at Azure Oxford on "Combatting illegal fishing with Machine Learning and Azure - for less than £10 / month). The recording of that talk is now available for viewing!The talk focuses on the recent work we completed with OceanMind. They run through how to construct a cloud-first architecture based on serverless and data analytics technologies and explore the important principles and challenges in designing this kind of solution. Finally, we see how the architecture we designed through this process not only provides all the benefits of the cloud (reliability, scalability, security), but because of the pay-as-you-go compute model, has a compute cost that we could barely believe!

Speaking at NDC London: Combatting illegal fishing with Machine Learning and Azure

Carmel Eve

In January 2020, Carmel is speaking about creating high performance geospatial algorithms in C# which can detect suspicious vessel activity, which is used to help alert law enforcement to illegal fishing. The input data is fed from Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2, and converted into data projections optimised for high-performance computation. This code is then hosted in Azure Functions for cheap, consumption based processing.

Jess Panni

Principal I

Jess Panni

Jess has over 25 years' experience helping companies succeed through the smart use of technology. He has spent most of his career working for leading Microsoft partners across the UK and Australia and is now Principal at endjin, working with clients to envision and execute disciplined innovation programmes.

Jess worked at endjin between 2015-2020.