Will it be hard and expensive to employ people with the skills to use this product?
Middleware is usually over sold on the promise that you can take a lower cost non-technical person, put them in front of this high priced graphical drag and drop integration engine and have them productively chugging out interfaces for you.
It’s really not true, the economics do not pan out. Integrating data does require technical people to be involved. No matter what solution you pick some people with technical skills are going to be required. A pure hardware guy is not going to be able to operate an engine. You can only go so cheap on staff before you will start to pay for it.
I used to have a mentality of hiring cheap staff. But then I discovered that cheap people are cheap for reason. I paid for it. I got headaches that I had to pay competent people to clean up.
When it comes to staff, you do get what you pay for.
The Translator is a solution to make a competent person more productive.
The Iguana Translator does require that the person using it is comfortable with simple programming. It’s the most productive environment possible for coding because of it’s unique visual nature. Look at the video. The good things are:
- You don’t need a ‘professional Lua programmer’. There is no such thing. It’s like being a professional tiddlywinks player! Anyone who knows any kind of language whether it’s C#, Java or Delphi is going to find picking up Lua a doddle. That’s why I picked it.
- It’s much easier to find someone with development experience than to find someone familiar with a specific interface engine or who has experience with HL7. The beauty of the Translator is that any programmer can pick it up and get the work done without having ever dealt with EDI or HL7 before.
- As a manager you will love the productivity you get out of people using Lua within the Translator. I love the productivity I get out of my own people with it.
It’s also going to be a much easier sell for you as a manager to convince your people to use the Translator. It’s an environment which is fun to use and technical people who use it will feel that they can use their development skills in a manner which helps them grow. This is in contrast to a traditional engine which most developers hate since:
- They find it cumbersome.
- It feels like it dumbs things down which doesn’t help them keep their skills sharp.
I don’t know about you, but I have certainly bought products which my team has refused to use. The Iguana Translator is not one of those products.
Remember that good quality employees will be sizing you up as an employer just as much as you are trying to assess their fit for your organization. The Translator makes your organization a more attractive place to work for.
So in summary, using the Translator will make it easier to find, recruit and retain the kind of people that have the skills required to handle mapping medical data. It’s not a challenge from a human resource perspective.
Eliot Muir, CEO of iNTERFACEWARE