We recently had the privilege of interviewing Mr. Hamza Batterjee, President and CEO of Megamind IT Solutions. Hamza Batterjee’s journey through these years and emerging in the current position, bridging the market gaps by merging technology and Healthcare, is truly inspiring. In this interview, the CEO shares his passion and visions for the company, the challenges, the wide range of services Megamind offers, and the key to effective teamwork.
Megamind IT Solutions is the MENA Region IT Solutions provider of business information solutions, services, and consultancies, adding value to their clients. Hamza’s insight on having a customer-focused approach while prioritizing employees, facing challenges the right way, and qualities to focus on while starting in this field offer invaluable lessons for aspiring young professionals.
An Overview
We started the interview by asking, “Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your educational background, and what sparked your interest in the healthcare IT sector?”
He shared, “I am the President & CEO of Megamind IT Solution, committed to leading the group to growth and expansion. With a single-minded dedication to “Excellence – by design and not by chance,” I have a track record of taking Companies, employees, and their partners to greater heights. My focus to emerge as a leader in the diverse business heads stems from research and strategic thinking on a global scale.
I have graduated from Regent Business School, London, specializing in Global Business Management, and am a keen observer of numbers with an eye for detail.”
He continued, “I strongly advocate that the only way towards fast growth is to be ‘customer focused’ and ‘creating a long-term partnership,’ filtering down to every decision and action in Megamind IT Solutions. The hallmarks of Megamind’s culture include open culture, participative management practices, innovations, continuous improvement, speedy response, empowerment, and enjoying one’s job.
Resolutions in technology are essential for the health care sector looking to navigate the uncertainties of the future. As a Leader and technologist, I identified digital transformation on the front foot with a new urgency to deploy technology at scale to improve business performance & health outcomes.”
Inspiration Behind This Company
We were intrigued to learn about the crucial factors that inspired Hamza Batterjee to build his company. So, we asked, “What was the driving force or inspiration behind founding Megamind IT Solutions?”
Hamza shared, “Megamind IT Solutions was established in 2018 as a dedicated digital IT solution provider with a small team managing an in-house built HIS system.
In the subsequent year, our company established a software development company located in Manilla, Philippines, and initiated the operation of the Oracle ERP (eBusiness) team. Megamind established itself in IT Infrastructure and enterprise software projects across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.”
“The next growth phase was triggered in 2020 and executed in 2021 with a significant tender sent out to the market for outsourcing the IT for Saudi German Hospitals in Saudi Arabia. This tender was responded to by multiple participants, which would signify the first LTC (long-term contract) for Megamind, adding from its IT project capability to managing various hospitals with the whole of IT outsourcing.
Megamind won the tender in 2021, which triggered the next growth phase for Megamind. After winning this bid over the subsequent years, Megamind has won hospital contracts in Egypt, hospital projects in UAE, and offers with medical universities. Megamind has completed hundreds of IT projects and delivers IT services to multiple hospitals, with over 6000 beds in total.” He added.
Overview Of The Services
“For our readers unfamiliar with Megamind IT Solutions, could you provide a brief overview of your services and products?”
He replied, “Megamind IT Solutions integrates people and technologies to deliver quality products and innovative solutions to business challenges in the GCC region. We guarantee our customers achieve high returns on investment with a low total cost of ownership alongside tailored solutions.
We believe effectiveness is achieved only through proper planning and understanding of technology. Our specialized team is always ready to address any infrastructure-related requirements.
– We build data centers
– We build complex network infrastructures
– We offer security and surveillance solutions
– Integrated building management systems
– Alarms and notifications systems”
Hamza added, “Our healthcare applications are designed to achieve customer satisfaction in Healthcare and Education. We specialize in the following solutions, including, Hospital Information Management System, Laboratory Information System, Radiology Imaging Solutions, Bed Management System, School Management System, Electronic Health Records, and Customer Relationship Management.
We also offer solutions that help enterprises and departments automate strategic processes, including Oracle Business Solutions, Interactive Call Center, Watson Analytics, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, System Integration and Deployments.”
Stand-Out Factors
To learn more about the approaches that Hamza Batterjee adopts to emerge as a strong firm in the competition, we asked, “How do you envision Megamind IT Solutions standing out in the competitive healthcare IT market in the MENA region?”
Hamza replied, “The Future is in Tech Adoption in the Healthcare sector. So, to organize ourselves for a better future, we should embrace the imperatives that will define “who we are”; “how we operate” and “how we grow.”
Megamind IT Solutions sees a significant opportunity, and the pressure to change has been building, with businesses worried their organizations are too slow, siloed, bogged down in complicated matrix structures, and bureaucratic. Many leaders feared, and the pandemic confirmed, that their companies were organized for a disappearing world—an era of standardization and predictability overwritten by four significant trends: a combination of heightened connectivity, lower transaction costs, unprecedented automation, and shifting demographics.”
He continued, “Digitally enabled care is at the heart of the health-tech transformation. AI will support clinical decision-making, improve care orchestration and efficiency, and power workflow automation. Digital healthcare transformation already presents opportunities for a more significant shift to remote patient care through telehealth. Health improvements in community social health will be enabled through coaching and gamification.
Technology will work harder, developing solutions that reach more patients in new ways and enabling community healthcare workers to provide remote care like virtual training. Digital transformation is essential to improving health care and strengthening customer, health care workers, and patient relationships. Megamind IT Solutions is foraying into these fields with a Future Forward recipe for a successful technology transformation in Healthcare.“
Overcoming Challenges
“Every business faces challenges, especially in dynamic sectors like Healthcare and technology. Could you share a particular challenge Megamind has faced and how you overcame it?”
He replied, “In the past few years, our company faced stagnant markets, new challenges, competition, and inflationary and pandemic-related pressures, unable to determine if this was a transitory or more fundamental problem. In the first months of 2021 and throughout 2022, it became increasingly apparent that these problems will be prevalent in the market, particularly affecting the tech industry and causing stress on the healthcare segment, where it primarily operates.
I was particularly challenged about the future of the organization in the short & long term with questions including where customers will see value in investing in technology, how they can design our products, services, and experiences to deliver this value, what capabilities we will need to increase the company’s innovation and control costs, and several others.”
“These questions enabled us to be the integrator, allowing the Company to play a pivotal role in setting a clear direction, aligning the organization, managing stakeholders, and serving as the “Chief Motivator.” One of the significant achievements was to invest in upgrading their Health Information System (HIS) to meet the standard of Governmental Health Regulations, a cutting-edge healthcare transformation by measuring clinical outcomes, patient engagement, and clinician use of EMR technology to strengthen organizational performance, health outcomes across patient populations, and others.
Scaling Back on growth plans Post-Pandemic as President & CEO, I had to control the most significant moves and accounted for a major share of the company’s performance. As a CEO, I set high standards and broad expectations of shareholders, customers, and employees. Inflation affected its purchases and, in large part, depleted supply chains. It forced the firm to build resilience in finance, operations, technology, organization, business model, and reputation. Megamind IT Solutions used a two-pronged strategy: benchmark its performance to the industry and disrupt the industry.” Hamza added.
Effective Teamwork
We further asked, “How do you ensure teamwork and maximize results without causing employee burnout? How do you motivate your team?”
Hamza shared, “A twin focus on developing and managing people well gives us a long-term performance edge. Our motto has been that of transforming human resources into competitive advantage, especially given the technology field that we are in. We are trying to be more effective at turning human capital into a real competitive advantage.
While investing in people is essential, our experience showed that another ingredient is needed to bring out their best and channel their efforts into results, and that is through several factors. As a technology company, we built a bottom-up innovation and collaboration culture, positive and inclusive work environments, employee rewards and advancement opportunities, and on-the-job coaching.
We build a model of an organizational structure and prioritize each element of the metrics. We were considerate in setting a direction and calibrating our ambition—which is, we developed a clear perspective appropriate to our organization. Also, there was a strong emphasis on cultivating talent and investing in the Leadership that will take us forward. We integrated these to match the scale, preparing us to adapt to new situations, challenges, and opportunities.”
He added, “We recognized that human capital is not merely a labor input; people are our company’s core asset. We thereby build the theme that our workplace should work for employees, with coaching to help them develop support structures and workflows that remove frustrations. Each person has a unique, living, breathing set of capabilities that belong to the individual and where they are put to work. We have come to understand that our people are the products of different factors. We are developing programs that stretch their capabilities or represent a match that better utilizes their skills, and this is done with exposure to varied training programs in Leadership, talent & skill scaling both in the technical and personal capacities.
While we have a composite workforce that ranges in age group and nationality, we have found that most of the conventional wisdom about generational or ethnic differences doesn’t hold. To motivate them, we have tried to understand our people’s needs throughout their careers and build their work experience around those. We listen to as many as possible and have used that feedback to create a constant dialogue and involve them in decisions about their work experience.”
Game-Changing Trends
“The healthcare IT sector is rapidly evolving. What trends or technologies do you see as game-changers shortly?”
Hamza replied, “Leadership is critical for implementation management, and digital transformation accelerators are also important. Megamind underscores the importance that organizational Leadership understands and supports digital transformation efforts and follows through with appropriate resources, staffing, and decision-making authority. This allows digital transformation leaders to think outside the box, speed up product development cycles, and change the organizational culture around digitalization.
Leaders are essential to change managers in the process of digital transformation, and governance should be in place to prioritize projects and set defined goals:
- Digital Leadership aligned to overall business strategy.
- Leadership driving through communication and transparency.
- Ready next-generation talent of the correct quantity and quality.
- Integrate Cybersecurity in digital implementation.
- Be flexible and scalable to gauge ever-evolving technologies.
- Create and measure KPIs for digital initiatives.”
He added, “Also, AI, Big data, and Robotics are going to be huge in healthcare and are poised to provide numerous potential benefits for individuals and the health sector alike, including robotic surgeons, chatbots for mental well-being, in-patient mobility monitoring, personalizing treatments with more insightful clinical data, and many more.”
Staying Ahead Of The Trends
We were curious to learn how Hamza plans to maintain his company on top of the trends. So, we asked, “How does Megamind plan to innovate and stay ahead of these trends?”
He replied, “Megamind IT Solutions creates technology and applications in healthcare business areas/functions that mature clients and clients can use with little experience in digital technology transformations. Looking closely at challenges to digital transformation, we created three primary factors that emerged as critical to capturing value for our customers in health care today – and in the future.
Firstly, the use of digital tech to achieve strategic differentiation in doctor-nurse-patient engagement and innovation. This ground-level and direct patient care drove in-depth patient health interaction and made time and Cost efficiencies in health, medicine & therapy management. Secondly, the development of proprietary health assets via AI, data, and software. Finally, we focus on developing tech-healthcare staff (doctors, nurses, pharmaceutics, radiology, and other executives) with better integration of tech talent into the varied health sector functions.”
“These tech-enabled processes drove the bottom line to fare better for all three types of digital transformations that we implemented: building new heath digital functions, strategically transforming the core functions in patient care with digital tech, and updating the core health tech to ensure future competitiveness.
Megamind’s various interactions and survey results with its customer base suggested that the health sectors are building new digital transformation for reasons other than strictly financial ones, which could explain why a significant change in the patient’s overall experience with health management showed motivating results.” He added.
Advice To Beginners
Our last question was, “What advice would you give aspiring entrepreneurs looking to venture into healthcare IT?”
Hamza replied, “There is an interesting quote from Andy Grove: “Success breeds complacency, complacency breeds failure.”
Likewise, entrepreneurs must sustain momentum and high performance to avoid complacency and create value. The business world resembles Formula One cars on a track full of unexpected turns, multiple surfaces, and unpredictable weather. Like everything about the Entrepreneur, the dynamics at play are as much about the institution as they are about themselves. As traditional competition will fade in the rearview mirror in the fast-changing business and technology dynamics, emerging competitors will gather their forces. It becomes increasingly difficult to define what winning looks like.”
“Also, you need to spend time listening, learning, and connecting dots while keeping the focus on success.
In our case, I spend significant time looking externally – but only at things that would help the business stay competitive. For our health-tech products, I spent an enormous amount of time understanding what was going on, understanding patient needs, meeting health providers, attending health conferences to get the latest research, and studying the competition on the ground.
Moreover, Entrepreneurs need to be grounded in asking for factual answers to a holistic set of questions about Strategy, Capital allocation, Cost and capital, Commercial, Organization, and reputation. You should clearly define the next S-curve, consciously or instinctively, and understand the need to get others involved in shaping the plan. As strategies are formed, implemented, and reach fruition, Entrepreneurs need to create a rhythm of change by pulling all the available business levers, adjusting their leadership style, and propelling the company to new performance levels.
To achieve positive outcomes, you must recognize that the best time to prepare for a crisis is never on the day of the problem. Create a crisis handbook that stresses the leadership protocols, control rooms, action plans, and communication preparation for a crisis. Future Proofing involves actively building talent strength and energizing coaching, performance & change management, and succession planning. This needs to be done for the most value-creating roles—the most important being that of the Entrepreneur.” He concluded.
Connect with Hamza Batterjee on LinkedIn.
Find Megamind IT Solutions on LinkedIn or visit the Website to learn more.
You can communicate on info@megamind-it.com
