Project : Iran’s first enterprise app on a phone

Didgah Hamrah was Iran’s first B2B enterprise office-automation mobile app, built at Chargoon, where I worked from 2009 to 2016. It put a company’s management information system on a phone or tablet, and carried the employee self-service side of Chargoon’s timekeeper software with it. It ran on top of organisations that already had Chargoon’s Didgah Total Solution. The product is documented at http://www.chargoon.com/didgah_hamrah/.

I was Mobile Product Manager from June 2013 to November 2016, and the project ran from June 2013 to May 2016. My work was the product: the value proposition, what the app did and for whom, and directing the API integrations that connected it to the MIS and timekeeper systems underneath.

How it got approved

Running those large deployments, I kept seeing the same thing: senior managers could not sign a letter without being at a desk. So they did not sign.

I proposed Iran’s first enterprise mobile application. Putting organisational data on personal phones frightened everybody.

I went and found the evidence. More than sixty percent of visits to well known sites were already on mobile, and the people avoiding our system were avoiding the desk, not the software. Then we worked out the security and legal position in Iran.

The company said it had no mobile team. A week later I went back to the chief executive with a different shape: hire a contractor, on condition they hand over the source code, train the people we would need, and pass it to our team.

Two weeks after that the chief executive called me in and told me I was running it, from finding the user needs to designing the product.

We built Android first, then iOS.

What it did

Oil, gas and petrochemical managers used it, and large private companies with them. It became one of the profitable products in the company’s range, and people started to notice an office automation system being run from a phone.

Marketing measured customer engagement up thirty percent, with senior managers using it more across the month. It added eight percent to the company’s total sales that year.