Radovan Slíž · WorkSys.Space · 04/08/2026
Am I buying another dead end?
The question of whether we can connect this too never comes at the start of a meeting. It comes once the talk gets concrete. And it is not really about technology, but about the fear of another isolated island.
One question keeps coming back in our meetings. It does not come at the start, rather somewhere in the second half, once the talk gets concrete: and can you connect this to it as well?
I used to take that question as a technical one. Today I hear something else in it. The person is really asking: am I buying another dead end? Will this be another system that lives its own life and that we will be working around in two years?
I understand where that fear comes from. Most companies already have at least one system behind them that promised everything and ended up as an isolated island.
Photovoltaics as the test
Most recently it was photovoltaics. A company invested in a PV plant and suddenly needed to see generation and consumption side by side. Not in two systems, in two windows, with manual retyping into Excel. In one view, with the calculations in between: how much of our own generation we actually consume, when we buy from the grid needlessly expensively.
What is instructive about that requirement is that nobody could have predicted it at the time of the original deployment. When sub-metering of consumption was being set up at the customer, photovoltaics was not in the plan. When it then arrived, no new system and no new project were needed. The PV generation was connected as another data source into the WorkSys.Space platform, and the balance was assembled from measurements that had long been running.
The least visible part of the work
Integrations are the least visible part of our work. Nobody boasts that a meter from 2018, from the days when connectivity was an afterthought, today sends its data where it belongs. But when I look back at the projects that live and grow, that is exactly where it was decided. Not in what the platform could do on the day of deployment, but in what could be connected to it on the day a new need arrived.
Related on this site:Case study: complete energy balance with PV