What do the user requirements look like?

What kind of user would like a ‘Software for Domain Experts’ company and why?

To some extent, generalising a user doesn’t make sense – everybody’s needs are different – and you need domain expertise to work out what they are.

For example in the oil and gas industry, where your writer has some domain expertise, there have been ‘software for domain experts’ companies performing complex subsurface data analytical tasks, mapping data onto geographical information systems, keeping track of costs and anomalies in project development, integrity gravity data with seismic data, managing drilling data reports, helping make decisions about supply chain management. Even with massive oil and gas domain expertise, it would be hard to spot these business opportunities before someone else.

However there are some factors which bring many of these projects together.

Your expert (we imagine) is working with many different data sources – and spends his time logging into different systems to gather the data.

There is probably some kind of work which needs to be done on the data – at least part of which can be easily automated. For example a certain mathematical processing task,  integrating one data set with another, spotting data which is obviously wrong, making it easier to manage and find the right data, or indexing data against a map.

Perhaps the user is too busy to regularly check all the data available – and would benefit from a algorithm or search system which can go through the data and spot something which could be worth the user’s attention.

The user might need to contact colleagues or be updated about what they are doing.

Probably the user needs to make a ‘diagnosis’ of some kind, or a decision about what needs to be done.

Then if something is done, then the next step is to implement the decision and see how well has been implemented.

Software systems can do all of this and much more – with specialist experts building tools, using mass produced software frameworks.