Client Description:

As an agency of the Federal government and a servant of the public, the U.S. Coast Guard is a leader in improving the boating experience of the maritime public.

Customer Quote:

"We [US Coast Guard] began a complete re-evaluation on how we should accomplish our responsibility to provide quality recreational boating safety support and information to our customers. Prospect Technologies was our partner every step of the way!"

The US Coast Guard Office of Boating Safety (OPB) has the unique mission to “minimize the loss of life by the public, personal injury, property damage and environmental impact associated with the use of recreational boats, through preventive means, in order to maximize safe use and enjoyment of all U.S. waters by the public.”

The largest segment of “first line” customers for OPB are primarily external to normal Coast Guard operations, they are the recreational boaters of the United States who possess a wide variety of educational levels, boat and vessel types, geographical distribution, and needs from the US Coast Guard. In addition to recreational boaters, OPB's constituency also includes a diverse boating safety community -- The National Association of State Boating Law Administrators (NASBLA), the National Safe Boating Council (NSBC), the US Coast Guard Auxiliary (USCGA), the US Power Squadron (USPS) -- a heterogeneous group of dedicated citizens, state officials, not-for-profits, and corporations all focused on improving boating safety for citizens in the United States.

Faced with outdated technology and aging management processes, OPB and Prospect Technologies took a long and hard internal look at processes and customer responses.

To really improve on these processes, OPB management began targeting on the needs of their customers (recreational boaters). This focus eventually involved recognizing several growing trends among US citizens and organizations:

• The growing trend to a paperless work environment;

• The ability to obtain important information and data fast and easily; and

• The use of modern computer technology to speed the flow, quantity and quality of information.

One of the outgrowths of this systems-wide "rethink" was for Prospect Technologies to develop a highly interactive Web site with various forms of searching, information downloads, and data base repositories. It was this active use of the Internet that enabled OPB with Prospect Technologies' help to provide information and data to recreational boaters and the general public. The ability for customers to be able to "pull" the information they needed from the Prospect Technologies constructed "customer friendly" Web site and Data Bases was identified as a critical step to better accomplish the OPB mission.

Currently, the Web site has grown to more than 1,000 Web pages. This is a major award winning Web site and has been recognized by such organizations such as Netscape, Yahoo, USAToday, Yacht World, BoatingSafety.com, CyberTeddy, and PUSH Electronic Magazine.

It is housed at Prospect Technologies' secure server farm. The current Internet access is 10 Mega bits per second [the equivalent to between 6 -7 T1 lines] and has burstable bandwidth capabilities up to a complete T3 line [45 Megabits per second].

Some of the current Web site features that Prospect Technologies developed include:

• All of the Office of Boating Safety publications in HTML as well as common word processing formats.

• Searchable links to the Federal Register to allow the recreational boater to have on-line and real-time input to Federal Policy matters dealing with the recreational boater.

• A detailed search engine to Online databases of boating recalls, and subject specific safety campaign material.

• Online boating accident statistics.

• On-line boating safety courses and detailed information on how and where to take boating safety courses.

• Summaries of the State Boating laws with information on how to contact each State Boating Office.

New and leading edge technology such as JAVA, JAVA script, Server Parsed HTML Pages, ASP Data base queries via Web interfaces have been employed on the site to make the OPB Web presence easy to use and as informative as possible.

Currently, the Web site is visited by nearly 25,000 unique visitors each month who stay, on average, between 6 and 7 minutes per visit. The site receives over 10,500 hits per day and nearly 150 other boating Web sites have linked directly to OPB's Web site as a source of current, quality news and information about recreational boating. Visitors have come to the site from 150+ different countries around the world and each month over 4.0 gigs (4,000 Megs) of information is downloaded from the OPB Web site to our customers.

The Office of Boating Safety Web site is still growing. In order to meet the demands of our customers, we have several new and innovative plans currently under development. Some of these projects include:

• An on-line customer complaint form that will feed an on-line database of boating safety related information.

• Openly market the components and capabilities of the OPB site.

• Continued publication of all OPB campaigns, materials and pamphlets in both HTML as well as common word processing format.

• Complete searchable boating accident statistics in a highly "user friendly" format, including a legacy database dating back to 1986.

• A "push" E-mail system to alert our growing electronic mailing list -- now in excess of 3,000! -- of urgent developments and important issues in the area of Boating Safety.

• The establishment of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) over the Internet between the Office of Boating Safety and the State Boating Offices (NASBLA). This will include a partitioned server permitting three layers of security, including Sequel Socket Layer (SSL) protection. All of this will allow public and private transfer of information via a series of secure and public Web sites.

We feel that by keeping in close contact with our customers -- the recreational boating public -- along with the management / technology process described earlier in this article, we will be able to deliver excellent customer service and superior recreational boating safety support well into the 21st century.