By Kazeem Olalekan CEO Iforg Limited
“A vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others” – Jonathan Swift, Anglo-Irish author and satirist
The above quote brings a wry smile to my lips. No doubt there was a good dose of satire imbued in that quote when it was written by the then Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. For there to be a vision, there must invariably; be a visionary. To the visionaries, we ascribe a lot of superhuman attributes; thus setting them up for an immaculate fall.
In the preface to the book that has now turned out to be Iforg Limited’s first completed project: “The Doctrine of Universal Truths” (2013), I wrote the following:
The journey so far…
Iforg Limited was incorporated on the second of October 2002 as a private limited company. I planned to use this company as a vehicle for developing my information technology (IT) career, and I needed a unique name. So I worked all night long on the right name. I came up with what I thought was a good one: INFOSYS—Information Systems—but, alas, this name had already been taken by a global behemoth. So I went back to the drawing board. In the end, I settled for IFORG: Information Organisation. It was unique, and, in 2006, I registered it as a trademark.
The stated aim of the business was to do good—i.e., to do the right thing in all aspects of the company’s undertakings. The mission was to develop patented or copyrighted technological solutions of the highest quality through focused projects, which would revolutionise the way specific tasks were performed in a stated area of practice. The core focus of Iforg, as I saw it, was to harness the many benefits of IT to deliver the best productivity results in different areas of health care practices.
The key was to rely on the strategic use of certain information technologies to deliver health care solutions, which would revolutionise the way certain tasks were performed. The underlying objective was to develop useful systems that would improve productivity and minimise the incidence of clinical errors.
As someone with an undergraduate degree in pharmacy and a post-graduate degree in business information technology, I thought the growth strategy for the business was very clear, but whenever I was asked, “What is it that you do?” I struggled to articulate it convincingly. The real purpose of the business would only become clearer later.
This is a true story of how I found my purpose and that of my business…
I am a visionary after all, I just didn’t know it at the time. As a wise man once said: “…you can only connect them (the dots) looking backwards…”. I started out by just wanting – deeply – to do the right things (which, in any case, might look and feel different to different peoples). The Armagh project, and in the manner it was executed, was clearly not meant to be the first completed project of this company but we remained agile in the face of relentless challenges. In this post, I will re-examine what our purpose is through our vision, mission, strategies and values.