Realizing the Promise of Technology, it cannot be done alone.

We asked a speaker of BCS North America 2019, Ken Flannigan, Global BIM Director, KONE a few questions about himself, his role and the industry we are in…We hope you gain insight from reading his responses.

I’m a father of three, ages 11, 8, and 6 and a husband to a wonderful and very understanding wife seeing as I travel a fair amount. Starting my career in architecture and being an early adopter of BIM I spent 8 years training and consulting for just about every organization type you could imagine. For the past 3 years I’ve led the global BIM efforts of KONE, a manufacturer, installer, modernizer and maintenance provider of elevators and escalator equipment.

What interests you (outside of work)?

I enjoy mountain biking. Surprisingly, the DFW area has great cross country bike trails.

What do you feel is most lacking in our industry currently? And how do you think this can be changed?

Most lacking in our industry: shared collaboration resulting in the reduction of redundant work. The first step to changing this is identifying the continuum of decision-making/influence being not wholly in any one stakeholders hands, then building connections that transport insight and progress.

What are some of the issues you face and how do you manage to overcome these issues?

Today we are actively implementing BIM in 11 countries across Europe and Asia, which comes with significant local challenges. We feel strongly that BIM should happen as close to the project as possible and have adjusted our organization to provide our customers BIM-enabled solutions engineering for their project in their geographic area.

What have you achieved and how?

Today we automate the creation of equipment models from 4 global supply lines serving 22 BIM-enabled front lines from Asia-Pacific to Middle East, across Europe and North America. We also distribute over 5000 models a month through our online equipment planning tools and BIMobject. What I am most proud of, is our 3D and 4D coordination services we perform in-house to make construction smoother. We have a 100% success rate solving issues every single project we coordinate using BIM.

Tell us more about what the next steps are for you in your role?  What you wish to go on to achieve?

Really excited about our recently formed Digital Built Environment technology management group which will shepherd the next generation of integration of our equipment models including immersion, real time rendering, computational planning, openBIM and reality capture.

Tell us more about your session –

Title: Level of Decision

Synopsis: How do tools and processes help us make better decisions as early as possible? We asked designers, builder and owners in a series of in person workshops and learned a lot about how the next generation of tools along with some simple enablements can help move the industry forward.

What was the motivation behind your abstract submission and why should delegates attend?

We started mapping the decision journey of designers last year. We hoped to understand the “what, when, how and who” so that we could figure out how to help through digital and human means. The framework that emerged can be used to plot shared collaboration across the industry in a very practical way.

Who are you hoping to reach with your presentation and why these people in particular?

I’m looking for the frustrated design technologist and business leader trying to find ways realize the promise of all this technology. This is not something any one of us can do alone, and to wait for the industry roll-up to happen from the top down is complacent and boring.

What are you hoping delegates will gain from your session?

Delegates should leave with a flexible framework for partnership within their project that supports a step change in design/construction productivity.

Ken is presenting in the BCS Session 1.3 “Level of Decision” his session is open to all BILT (and of course BCS) attendees.

P.S Already registered? If you want to join this session you can do so by modifying your agenda selection in Session 1.3. You can modify via this link. (You will need to enter your email and registration reference number)