Nigeria

On Sunday I flew out to Nigeria, with much trepidation. All the stories one hears about Nigeria are enough to make you wonder why we came here at all. From airport pick up scams to credit card fraud, undrinkable water and food which is questionable at best.


The six hour flight to Lagos is long. Too short to have a sleep and long enough to get bored. I manged to catch up on a little reading and watched Syriania (which was quite good - but more about that later.). The airport in Lagos was much more modern than I expected. Beside the length of time it took to get through passport control and customs it was fairly uneventful.


We met Paul at the airport and had an uneventful journey to our hotel. I forgot of course that the Nigerians drive on the right hand side of the road. All the visual cliches that one conjours up about deepest darkest Africa are completely true. Paint is clearly not an affordable commodity. Most of the buildings are a drab concrete grey. Motocycle taxis are everywhere and drive like Kamakazi pilots. Traffic lights are non-existant. A couple of traffic circles is a cursory consideration of traffic ettiquette. This journey would prove to be no preperation for the following morning.


The Sheraton is as modern as most. If you ignore the six feet high palisade fences, the armed guards at the gate, the guards armed with R4 rifles and the guards posted on every floor, the Sheraton is just like any other hotel. Imprints are taken of your credit card and then placed in a sealed envelope. This inspires much confidence. Not. The rooms are not bad. Fairly well laid out. Several DSTV channels are available so there is some sense of home. I quickly unpacked and headed downstairs to the restuarant. There we bravely ordered cheese burgers. The patties were the size of horses and probably made of them as well. Lots of airline staff which proved entertaining the following morning - can't say more Laurie might be reading this!.


The journey in the morning has left a permanent imprint i my mond. The traffic is a free for all. Lanes are created on the fly and driving in not for the faint hearted. Yet surprisingly everyone remains relatively calm. Being spatially aware is an absolute requirement. Following distance extended to 1m at most. A lot of hooting occurs but is not often meant in anger but more as an overtacking warning to neighbouring vehicles and the car being overtaken. The taxis are all VW minivans and are all painted yellow. They do not drive any better than our local variety. If you are clastrophic, driving in Nigeria is not for you. Cars are never within 1m of the car all around you. Gary grabbed for the dashboard on many occasions preparing for certain impact. The 20km journey to the Fees office took us about one and half hours. It felt much longer. The pale look on our faces had nothing to do with the breakfast, well not yet anyway.


The Fees office appears to be a colonial throwback. It is a house that was probably built in the 60's and hasn't seen a coat of paint since. Fortunately it is a case of "don't judge a book by its cover". Not that it was very modern but better than the outside suggested. It reminded me very much of the house that is featured in "Empire of the Sun". The little boy gets left behind when the Japanese occupy Shanghai. The houses and the suburbs depicted in the film where what I imagine the Fees offices looked like 40 years ago.

We spent the day working on our various presentations and demo's that we had to do for the next day. It soon became apparent that we were there just for window dressing. Dillon's presentation was shot down in flames, which was really annoying because once again he got away with not doing anything. I was regulated to demo'ing Intelligent Question and Live Office. Me the demo king being showed up by Fees. I decided then and there just to relax and go with the flow. What ever they asked me to do I would do. As it turns out the Fees guys knew their stuff. I should them my demo environment and they picked it up immediately. Lots of real world expeirence.

The Event

On Tuesday we were picked up at 7 o'clock. The idea was to get to the venue early so we could do a dry run. That was the idea! 2 hours later we managed to get to Victoria Island and to the hotel. We got there with enough time to setup the vm demo. We checked the projectors, the reception area, tested the mics. And then the brakes were put on.

By 10 o'clock there were only about 3 people at the venue. This was hardly surprising however. It was pouring with rain outside and everyone was coming through the same traffic that we had been in just an hour earlier. We delayed the start but eventually got things going about 10h30.


David, the MD of Fees, spoke first. He discussed the merits of BI in general. Gary followed with a state of the nation presentation about Business Objects. Rachael then did a demo on a typical dashboard for an executive and then demo'ed the other dashboard and performance management functionality. I then did a demo on Intelligent Question and Live Office. The IQ demo went well. When I tried to demo Live Office in Excel I discovered to my horro that the BO toolbar was missing. In fact all the toolbars were missing from Excel. Fortunately I was able to swop across the PowerPoint and show the functionality there. 'Adams' followed me with a demo of Webi and Infoview. We then took a short break and proceeded with the customer references. 4 real, live, customers gave testimonials of their experieinces with BO. Unbelievably powerful. MTN Nigeria, Ecobank, BAT and UBA all discussed the merits of BO. When that was finished we had a Q & A session which was very positive and constructive. By the time we finished it was 13h30 and not a single person had left. We then had a finger lunch and the event came to an end after that.

Some observations

Fees Ltd pulled this event off by themselves with very little involvement from us and no request for financial assistance. The only thing that we had to do, other than giving one presentation and one demo, was to deliver 5 boxes with 'spiffs' for the event. We couldn't even get that right with only 1 box arriving in Lagos the night before the event. For some reason the boxes were originally sent to a partner in Malta. Go figure!

When we were doing the dry runs the day before, David was quite clear in his mind what role he had in mind for each person and used each person to maximise their strengths. I ended up demo'ing IQ and Live Office only because I had the most experience with it.

To do an event without trong customer involvement is just nuts. The power of the 4 references that Fees' had cannot be under estimated. They spoke with passion and discussed real world benefits that they had derived from the software. It was great to hear what had benefited them as apoosed to what our marketing department could come up with.

Fees provided each person that attended with a very smart leather folder. It contained a writing pad and some marketingware and a CD. It was a nice touch.

The day before the event we noticed a ¾ page advert for the event in the local newspaper (The Gaurdian). Talk about committement.