Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tim Panagos, CTO of Microshare (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Do you see gaps in the market where you see opportunities for entrepreneurs to build products or solutions?

Tim Panagos: There are many places where interpreting the data and doing something about it are pretty large gaps. Understanding what’s happening is only the first step. You need to take that and turn it into insights. From the insights, you turn that into action. That’s the insight value chain that we described to some of our customers.

If they don’t know how to take action on the insights that are generated, you can’t get the return. It’s the differences in the organization that will deliver value. In that gap from knowing to doing, there are so many niches. Any one of my use cases has that gap. That’s a great area for people to start with specialty consultation companies.

Do I specialize in how to help you reconfigure your space to improve the air quality on the basis of where people occupy? It might seem small, but it turns into a big problem for large companies who have to make these decisions. Do they change their heating and cooling systems in order to address it? Do they need to change their real estate footprint to address it? Do they need to change their human resources practices? There’s a lot that can go into that that makes that insight more tangible.

Sramana Mitra: My take is there is the opportunity to use data, mine data, and model data to understand things and find insights. Then there’s this whole other domain of automating the action. There are two kinds of actions. There’s one kind where human beings take the data and do something about it.

Then there’s full automation.

The industry is going to eventually go into full automation, but we are not there yet. There is a lot of human action right now. There are parts of the industry that are going to full automation. I’m seeing more and more that are doing interesting takes on automation right now.

Tim Panagos: Automation is great. I grew up in the process space. Processes have to go from ad hoc to manual standard, to automation. The biggest mistake I see people making is leaping over the middle part to automation and automating things that ought not to have been automated, because the outcomes of the process were unclear.

We love to automate things. I think that the risk in over-automating is that you build a kit that people either don’t understand the need for or the outcomes are not as clear on whether it impacts positively the system that you were working through. Ultimately, we’re an ad hoc world and experimenting. The next stage is to get those experiments and begin to standardize. Then automation will flow from that. We want to set into stone the practices that deliver value.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely. There is another point that is worth mentioning. Automation is highly domain-specific. Very often, the productization of that automation is very niche. There’s potential for building many, many small companies with very good niche domain knowledge in different domains.

Tim Panagos: That’s right. Even within commercial real estate, there are so many specialties. Even without that dimension, just the differences between the security of a building and the environment of the building, between human resources aspect and safety aspects. What we are providing is this deluge of new information, but that information needs to be parsed throughout the organization to make it match the way they think and help them take action. There’s so much to do in that.

Sramana Mitra: It was very nice to meet you. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tim Panagos, CTO of Microshare
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