Passing near her car, I thought I got a kind of déjà vu – the car had Abu Dhabi registration plate. And it had a right-hand steering wheel – the way it should be if you drive a car in Ireland.

How the car with right-hand steering wheel could get Abu Dhabi registration plate in Ireland?

1. Only 1 doctor is working in 41% of organizations;
2. 2 doctors in 26%;
3. 3 to 5 doctors in 21%;
4. 6 to 10 doctors in 9%;
5. More than 10 doctors in 3%.

Those 3% of hospitals and clinics, where more than 10 doctors work, bring the majority of profit to IT companies. Hope that people’s mentality will change in a few years and they start understanding that proper software tools might be beneficial not only for large hospitals, but for small pharmacies too.

International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) published the report stating that Saudi Arabia has the highest level of piracy in the Middle East. The full article is available here.

There were two meetings – with IT Manager and General Manager. Loose translation.

Meeting with IT Manager

“We have cool system, everything is automated and online. We only print out receipts for our customers, as well as certain reports. I really have no idea, guys, how you could help us. We have no problems.”

Meeting with General Meeting

“What we have is a piece of shit – it was a mistake to develop Information System in-house. We have more problems than benefits. Ambitions of our IT department is a good thing, but we are not in software business. Frankly, we are ready to invest into the new Information System from the specialized provider.”

Without knowing they are both talking about the same system, you might easily assume they even work in different companies. The current Information System is of course a baby of the IT department, and I completely understand it – everything is done by them. But management in business organization has a final word.

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Gentlemen, I can assure you that 16-hours working day is much easy to stand than 8-hours shopping.

My wife was also very tired from it. She said that full day shopping is not for her, and she would better buy stuff in passing. It is in fact very good news

Generally speaking, I get a headache after thirty minutes in the shop, so if I need to buy something, I want to buy it quickly. Is it only my reactions, or all men are the same?

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Now I feel that generation of the potential product ideas is one of the simplest tasks. Another thing is that you definitely should not implement all those product ideas, but it is different exercise.

We are getting new ideas simply developing our own product. I’ll give just a few examples that might end up as new software.

Connection to the database

It is not only us who got requirements to support different Database Management Systems like Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and MS Access as minimum requirements as well as ODBC connections to any database in addition. I’ve failed to find a good product that we could buy and build into our own software.

SQL Query Builder in your product

It is not only us who would like to have built-in SQL Query Builder in our product so that our users would be able to select tables and views in their database and build SQL statements visually, just like in MS Access. So far I’ve seen only Active Query Builder but that’s all.

Auto program updater

Couple years back when we started developing our product we made automatic program update ourselves. To be honest, it didn’t work very well, and it didn’t work for some of the customers. Finally, we understood that it’s easier to spend a few hundred dollars to buy a tool for auto updates rather than to spend time on non-core functionality for our software.

We played with many options and finally selected pretty simple auto update software AutoUpdate+. This program is nice, but some features are not very straightforward, and they might be implemented simpler way. It means there is room for a new auto update software.

There are other ideas for the new products we got, but we would rather leave them for ourselves for future implementation

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An interesting thing happened. One of the local government healthcare organizations started to implement electronic data exchange between healthcare providers and health insurance companies. The initiative is great. Also, the implementation was supposed to be pretty simple. At least the specification with all the requirements for data exchange is very easy to read. The main idea of such data exchange is that all organizations would convert their data to XML in a special format that is very close to HL7.

We started to develop our own product that could convert data to HL7, but the work was not very active as we didn’t know how difficult it would be for organizations to make their own converters and so how many potential customers we might get.

Back in June we helped our first customer to submit data electronically in a proper format. They started to develop their own converter in December 2007, but nothing really worked until June 2008. They got all kind of issues in their converter — either data were wrong, or format was invalid, or anything else.

Customer called as on Thursday saying they got deadline to submit data on Sunday — so we got three days to get our tool working. If customer would not be able to send the first portion of data by Sunday, they might get fined by the official authorities.

The rest of Thursday we spent learning more about XML, XSD, etc — thanks to W3Schools. Friday and Saturday was spent on very fast code writing with a lot of hardcoded stuff, workarounds, quick fixes and shortcuts – but anyway the code worked. On Sunday we spent some more time making fine-tuning to work with the customer’s database, and finally generated and submitted data. The customer avoided unnecessary expenses on fines, and we earned enough for the company to pay our bills for the next couple of months.

Of course, we could say we are very smart guys who were able to do the job for three days while the customer’s IT department sucked for six month without any success. But the point is that this kind of job would be done for three days if you work very hard in a kind of emergency, or seven to ten days if you do this job during normal working hours. The cheap IT force seems to cost more than getting smart and more expensive developers. The problem is not that all guys in the customer’s IT department are stupid – the problem is that I guess for their level of salary there is no way you can find somebody really smart.

This situation is for sure very good for us as we get a chance to earn pretty much money on the consulting. But for the customers it costs a lot to hire cheap programmers.

Another conclusion from all this — it is amazing how much people will never spend enough time reading the specs, although it is required for your data submission to the government and, as result, you might get fined by government or even loose your license if data aren’t sent correctly. So this is something you can make money on too.

Finally, this consulting work has forced our development for the converter to the format required for data exchange — it turned out that there is much more than one customer who got the same issues with data submission.

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Thinking about how education might be helpful, I wonder if it is really necessary for successful career and business. I will not take a well known example of Bill Gates; instead, I’ll talk about one example from my personal life.

It was summer 1996 when my friend and I started to work as programmers in one of the insurance companies. We just finished our third year in the University, so we could work full time during that summer, and part time during the next year. Our manager was a brilliant man. I think he was one of the best managers I ever had – dispite the fact that he had no education at all. After the school he worked in Electronic Workshop fixing TV sets. Then he started working in insurance, and at the time we came in he was Insurance Director.

I guess I had the same brilliant manage one time more afterwards. That guy also had ordinary Bachelor degree he got in a college in Boras.

All other managers I had were good enough, and some of them were really stupid guys. The education is good, but it cannot replace the common sense.

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The guy asked me something about where I came from, what I did in Saudi Arabia and thousands of other questions. I was answering trying to smile and showing I was really busy and wouldn’t want to continue talking as I had some urgent stuff to do.

When he asked me about what I did for living, I told him a little bit about our drug database. And you know what? That guy was a pharmacist. Even more, he was a chief pharmacist in Ministry of Social Affairs! He asked me for a demo CD and we exchanged business cards.

Yesterday we got a purchase order from Ministry of Social Affairs for five-year license. By the way, it is our first customer that has purchased a license for such a long period of time. And I was very close to clearly tell this guy that I was sorry, but I needed to make my job done…

The conclusion is that you would always have a demo CD or booklets with you. You never know where you might get a new customer. Probably, business card with a web address of your product works also fine, but folk here in the Middle Eats prefer to get something they could touch.

And the main thing - always talk to the people. It is probably the easiest and cheapest way to market your product.

Have you ever had an unusual situation when a new customer just came out from nowhere when least expected? Tell your story in the comments.

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