20 June 2020
Twenty Five years ago, a couple of scientists working as researchers at a US National R&D Lab made the decision to create a company focused on improving the decision support process by providing decision makers actionable intelligence through the analysis and modeling of large data sets. We were young, optimistic and devoid of any business experience. My colleague, Dr. Jae K Lee and I embarked on a journey that created a thriving company, permitted us to travel the globe, meet wonderful people and allowed us the opportunity to learn along the way.
Less than five years into our journey, Dr. Lee left Pangaea to found Pangaea 21 in Seoul, South Korea. I was on my own and It was a new phase for Pangaea as we embraced and leveraged new technologies and expanded into new sectors. Our mission of improving the decision-making process by developing tools that leverage existing data and provide sophisticated analytical tools directly to the decision makers continued. Over time, data sets have become larger and more complex however our initial vision is still valid in that decision makers require access and analysis of these data sets to support sound, timely and defensible decisions. 25 years ago, the primary issue was the lack of data as many organizations were just starting to acquire and organize data in databases whereas today the issue is often too much data. The focus has shifted to separating the “signal from the noise” in large unstructured data sets and providing real time analysis of the meaningful data that has been parsed out. The use cases vary from real time disease surveillance, healthcare patient safety and quality of care through flow optimization, risk assessment, military resource management decision support, management and analysis of air quality data across multiple nations, real time traffic data monitoring to the management and delivery of educational services to school aged children.
Our journey has taken us from geospatial modeling to the analysis of hyperspectral imagery to detect soil contamination and geologic features to real time artificial intelligence based analysis of medical patient information with one constant: our outstanding staff. A small business is defined by their employees. We have been fortunate to have an exceptional staff since we began. We wouldn’t be celebrating a 25th anniversary without these brilliant people. Aside from hiring the best people, it is imperative to engage like-minded honest, reliable and extremely competent support in terms of legal, accounting, benefits, and insurance services. We have assembled an all-star team of small businesses that provide these valuable services.
Any lengthy journey contains highlights and low points. Fortunately, the majority of the past 25 years consisted of highlights, but we also suffered some significant losses within the Pangaea family. We lost Brian Youngs to cancer in 2005 at the age of 28. Brian was one of the kindest, affable and capable people I have ever known. We miss him every day. Our co-founder, Dr. Lee passed away in early 2017. He was my partner, mentor, colleague, and friend. I couldn’t have done it without him. The best way to honor our departed colleagues is to continue to learn from them and incorporate their attitude and spirit into everything we do.
Over the past five years we went back to our roots and created a subsidiary, Pangaea Installation Management Services (PIMS) which is focused on providing training support and environmental management to military installations. Pangaea Information Technologies has developed the Flow Kaizen suite of tools supports value stream transformation (VST) and continuous improvement initiatives in healthcare. These tools provide data-driven, real-time visual cues to front-line staff in support of maintaining pace and flow of operations by providing the care visibility to flow disruptions as they occur.
As we enter our 25th year, we have embraced a new slogan “Uniting Your Data World”. Our focus is resolving the 4 common data issues: Data Gaps, Data Fragmentation, Data Overload and Data Management.
The fact that we have reached this rare milestone is a testament to our amazing staff, clients and partners. We are still supporting our first client and our first full-time hire is a key part of our senior management team. As we look toward the next 25 years, I would like to sincerely thank all of the wonderful past and present Pangaea team members, partners and clients who have made all of this possible.
Best regards,
Miki Ferenczy, President and Founder
Pangaea Information Technologies, Ltd.