New App Encourages Better Use of Building Data Through Nudging

Microshare announced a new app: React-M, which “pushes recommendations, alerts and scoring data directly to relevant teams and professionals, allowing for prompt and targeted reactions and providing an important link between the Internet of Things (IoT) data that Microshare’s solutions produce and Business Process Management (BPM) programs,” according to a company press release.

The software attempts to address a behavioral problem that is common in business. There are mounds of data available to top executives, and often even mid-level managers and line-of-business workers. But often, although data might suggest that people should take certain courses of action, no one does.

There are a number of reasons. Lack of time is big. How do you drop other things you’re doing to pursue a new issue when that decision could adversely affect performance reviews and compensation? 

Then there’s the need for analysis. Data without specific conclusions and implications means an incomprehensible babble of numbers when people, already short on time, would have to decipher them.

And third, distraction. No matter how inclined someone might be, remembering to add something new to the list of things to do is hard. There is a constant flood of new demands and urgent requests that can undermine the sincerest interests in improving operations.

Various fields—behavioral economics comes to mind—attempt to move people more effectively into taking actions they should. For example, requiring people to actively opt out of work programs that automatically put part of their earnings into a retirement account. Sometimes it’s a matter of overcoming inertia.

React-M is also an attempt to get people to do things, except a little more “in your face.” You could call it nagware, except for the old software industry of alerts popping up on applications, trying to bug people into upgrading a package. React-M looks to nudge users into doing something with data, with a dash of follow-up micromanagement. 

“’There’s been a lot of money spent on IoT projects, but the business fails to capture their full value because their staff fails to react to the data,’ Tim Panagos, Microshare Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder, said in prepared remarks. “React-M receives recommended actions triggered by IoT events interpreted by AI on the Microshare cloud. These recommended tasks are displayed as app notifications on the user’s phone or tablet, making it easy for staff to remediate problems before they get out of hand. Our experience tells us that behavioral change is the elusive last mile that determines the success or failure of most IoT projects.’”

Like your parents telling you to eat your vegetables. Cowboy up, as they used to say, and no fair deleting the app or muting notifications (which you know a lot of people will be tempted to do).