This was 2019 for me... Ready for 2020!
I never thought 2019 would be such an exciting year for me. At the beginning of January I was at the Business Kick-off of Graphisoft in Budapest, where we had our own private apartment until the middle of this year. A week later I was in Munich, and another week later "my" Feyenoord beat the big rival 6-2 in a swirling Kuip. I don't care that the stadium hasn't churned so much further this year... Sometimes you sail at high tide, sometimes at low tide!
In February, Giny and I made our first weekend trip of many, we visited sunny London and enjoyed ourselves. When you are away from work as often as I am, cherishing your personal relationship is very important.
Talking about cherishing my relationship, which is the main reason for me to give up my wonderful role within Graphisoft. I have been inseparable from my wife since 1989 and in recent years I have simply been too much, too far from home. I had a lot of trouble with that! During my visit to the IPC of Graphisoft in Mexico, I definitively decided to change tack! I will be home more often and I said goodbye to my nice colleagues...
In April I started as an interim Business Developer at the Netherlands Organisation for applied scientific research TNO in Delft, very close to my home ;) The Unit where I was working is called BI&M. It stands for Building, Infrastructure & Maritime. The fact that I was allowed to focus on BIM, Building Information Modelling, is of course a golden combination! Because the colleague with whom I was going to work announced that I was going to quit pretty soon after I took office, I was given a second task in addition to my interim task, as a consultant. From August I started working fulltime at TNO!
It goes without saying that this year I have been very active for the International Friendship Club buildingSMART, not only as co-lead of the BuildingRoom where we welcomed and discussed several new projects during our meetings in Beijing, Dusseldorf and Columbia, USA, but also in the local Chapter buildingSMART Benelux where I can strengthen the board again. This time to assist in the transition of the association to a collaborative organisation with relations with the Belgian and Luxembourg representatives of the building sector. During the Brussels Digital Construction congress in October, we signed a declaration of intent to this end.
I enjoyed being called by the CEO of BIMcollab, who asked me to be involved part time in building an international network of partners of his fast growing company. Issue management is very important in the BIM process and I really enjoy working with enthusiastic colleagues to help find good business partners. It was special to have a BIMcollab booth at Autodesk University in Las Vegas, we did good business. By the way, the work is taking me a bit more time than I expected, but we will be looking for another mode in 2020...
Digitisation is currently occupying a very prominent position within TNO's BI&M unit, which has resulted, among other things, in a Digitisation Agenda containing the various roadmaps of the various departments, insofar as these relate to a number of named Core Technologies; Linked Data, Artificial Intelligence, Platform Technology, BIM bots and Digital Twins.
I am therefore very pleased that the board of the unit has decided to set up a new "Digitalisation" cluster, of which I will be the initiator as of 1 January, 2020. As cluster manager / senior business developer, I will - with my colleagues - enter into Product Market Combinations in order to put TNO well on the map!
I'm (almost) ready for it, I'm really looking forward to it!
What I'm also looking forward to; moving into the beautiful apartment on the Waterweg, completely renovated by my wife and me. We leave the big house, now that the children are all gone, behind and go smaller, but a lot more luxurious!
As I said, it has been an exciting year, just wrote down some highlights. Got high waves this year but also saw deep valleys... The tide can't be steered but there is one thing for sure: The tides change all the time.
Make it a beautiful 2020, AHOY!
