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Welcome to the latest installment of Featured Conversations. Today, we start with our very own Head of Operations and movie-buff, Siully Fernandez.
Siully is a renaissance woman leading teams all over the world. She connects the dots between people, processes, and the Integrated Projects' product lines. During her time, she's fostered the growth of the largest BIM network in the world spanning 8 time zones digitizing 6 buildings per day. When she's not designing execution plans or managing the day-to-day, she's expanding her film repertoire.
What folks are you following that you feel are positively impacting the built environment in their own way?
Oh man. Liz Voeller is brilliant. Her perspective on climate, efficiency, industrial infrastructure, down to materials is one we should all be paying close attention to. Florent Poux’s research on semantic segmentation is massive for reality capture, and the AEC industry.
What’s the most common thing you hear from your users or clients?
Verbatim? “This is great”. Most of our users have a lot to say about the status quo software they use to model. They’re not very pleased. They use BIMIT and the hassle, that “ugh”, dissolves. It allows them to focus on higher value tasks, streamline workflows, reduce budgets, it’s incredible. When we circle back, we’re consistently hearing that BIMIT is a toolbox favorite.
Any advice for a building owner trying to understand digital transformation?
Assumptions can get expensive. Verify what you’ve got. You’ve already made the investment in purchasing the property, you own it, you should be the expert. Due diligence keeps you in the captain's chair.
What’s something you believe that no one else seems to believe?
What a digital twin actually is. A digital twin requires real-time data input/output to be defined as such. It seems everyone else thinks it’s any old digital replica or representation of a space or object. Maybe I take “real-time” too seriously.
What’s been your biggest issue with design technology to date?
Easy. Contact forms. It’s 2022, we’re in the microwave era, everything is instant. Why, in such a technology dominant industry, do we need to wait for someone to get back in touch to get started on a project or even find out how we can get started?
A book that’s shaped your work or industry philosophy?
Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness by Tim S. Grover, What is Strategy? by Michael E. Porter, Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, and Good to Great by Jim Collins. Not a day goes by that I don’t use, or at least contemplate, concepts in each of these books.
How do you describe what you do to a 5 year old?
We take pictures of the insides of buildings. Then we trace those pictures to draw a map of the building on a computer to see how big or small they are. This helps us figure out how many people or things fit, how much stuff we have, and how we can move things around without making a mess. Sometimes we just show our friends those pictures so they can figure out if they want to visit or keep the building for themselves.
What's a project that's been keeping you busy?
SCANIT. Figuring out how to do away with estimates, contact forms, negotiating, extra fees, etc. in an industry that requires so many inputs to generate one output. Making LiDAR scanning as accessible as we’ve been able to do with BIM through BIMIT is top of mind. Solving for that is living rent free in my mind.
Something LinkedIn doesn’t know about you?
I’m gay. J/k, they know. Industry related? I manage the largest, entirely remote, BIM network in the world. I’m the only Puerto Rican woman in the AEC industry to lead such an initiative. Non-industry related? I’ve watched 1,677 movies.
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