The Kingdom has become one of the fastest growing IT markets in the Middle East. RNCOS projected that the Saudi Value Added Service (VAS) market will witness a CAGR of around 10.6 percent during 2008-2015 and will account for up to 50 percent of the total ICT investments in the GCC during 2010-2012. However, the RNCOS report, "Saudi Arabia ICT Market Forecast 2014," asserted that there is still room for better end-user experiences and customization of applications, despite intense competition and price wars.

For anyone living in the Kingdom, that final statement is really no surprise. Saudi organizations, both public and private, are going paperless and automating their processes. But for the end-users - the people forced to interact with these "enhanced" systems - the outcome of many IT projects is far from satisfactory.

Consider the example of one private hospital in Al Khobar. This hospital isn't a fancy place, but over the past year it has undergone a facelift and early in 2011 the hospital management introduced a new IT system to manage patient workflows and backend processes. That system has caused misery.  

Now, sick individuals often wait for more than an hour in the patient reception area to have their medical records put into the queue to see the desired physician. Then patients wait while their files are found and conveyed to the doctors' offices. After seeing a physician, there will be more lines to take insurance approval for any required tests or to pay fees, plus the wait for the test. Getting a prescription from the hospital's pharmacy involves more waiting. Arab News visited the hospital on a dozen different occasions and saw that only early in the morning could patients navigate the system without terrifying delays at each point in the process.   

How could a system that was supposed to have such a positive outcome, turn into such a disaster? Arab News spoke with a senior member of the hospital's IT staff. "The system is incorrect for the requirement. Plus it's under resourced in terms of people, hardware and connectivity," said the man who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of losing his job. The IT administrator apologized to everyone hurt by the system but said the fiasco was created as a result of poor decision making from the hospital's owners and senior managers, combined with a desire for profits from the company which provided the packaged IT solution.

Organizations often put in IT systems without understanding what they're trying to achieve. They don't realize that unless they actually design the IT system to meet their business processes, they're going to make things a lot worse. To get some perspective on this issue, Arab News spoke with Andy Smith, a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS) and a member of the BCS Security Community of Expertise. 

"The problem with the Alkhobar hospital's system comes down to poor design. You constantly see this and not just in Saudi Arabia. It's everywhere," Smith remarked   "Management comes up with a cool idea and wants to put in a whiz bang prepackaged IT system that should work like magic, but all it's going to do is make things more complex and harder for people to use. And sometimes it's actually going to increase the resource requirements, rather than reduce the resource requirements."

Smith explained that the awful design of IT systems is a spreading sickness because managers don't understand the role of the systems analyst. Back in the "good old days," before using prepackaged code became fashionable, organizations would consult with a systems analyst who would come and look at the process required. He would consider the best possible design of the IT solution and do paper-based walkthroughs with both staff and customers. The analyst would work out what the main processes were and what the exception handling should be at each stage in the process. Only then would the coding of the IT solution begin.

"Before the code was written, you actually had a fully worked through process that everyone agreed to and you could see that it would actually improve things," said Smith. "Now what you get are people saying, 'Let's buy some servers. Let's get a copy of Oracle or SAP and we'll use those products to make our process better. It's completely the wrong way around. You don't find an application and then try and fit it to your business process, because what actually happens then is that you end up cramming your  business process into the limitations of the application. The outcome is doomed before the implementation of the system begins."

Marketing by IT companies, large and small, has made managers and company owners believe that prepackaged IT solutions are ideal. This view is spreading as organizations now consider cramming their processes into standardized cloud solutions.

"People think of Oracle as being a big database. It's not," Smith advised. "It's a programming language. Take SAP. It's not an accounting system. It's a programming language. It does not matter if you're using Oracle, C, Visual Basic -they're all programming languages. They're all bespoke code."

Smith further elaborated, "If you choose to do something with Oracle, you have a bespoke implementation of Oracle. It's not a standard off the shelf desktop application. Anyone who tells you, 'Don't do your own code. It's too complicated and you get supplier lock in,' as a theory, they're correct. In practice, they're not. Because in practice, if an organization goes with SAP, Tivoli or Oracle, there's still supplier lock in. Any one of them can't be easily ripped out and another slapped in its place."

Particularly in a market such as Saudi Arabia, where there's money to spend on IT but not enough talented programmers to go around, Smith pointed out that there will be fewer people skilled in programming the big applications such as Oracle and SAP, than available programmers who write C code.

"There is nothing wrong with an organization doing its own bespoke application," he said. "Get a systems analyst to work out the process and some C programmers to write the application. Use Java or something similar for the front end so it's web-based and looks pretty. When changes are needed, get some more C programmers and upgrade. Looking at things holistically, it is much cheaper to write an application that exactly meets organizational needs than it is to buy an off the shelf program and customize it."