Welcome to our July FME Community User Spotlight! Every month, we’ll be spotlighting a user in the community whose active participation and helpful contributions have been invaluable to the community. We’re excited to highlight their experiences and insights!

User Spotlight: Clifford Rutledge ​@crutledge 

What company do you currently work for?

Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA) | BeSpatial Ontario

What's your current job role and title?

TRCA: Solutions Analyst, GIS and Data, BeSpatial Ontario: Program Manager

Tell us more about what you do and how you use FME?

At the TRCA, I help teams across Planning, Engineering, and Environmental services streamline how they access and share data. I use FME daily to build automated workflows that transform and integrate data from multiple sources, making it easier to use in web apps, field tools, and reporting systems.

The TRCA has recognized the need for data integration, interoperability and the challenges of maintaining data in a data rich, science based decision-making organization. I have taken FME from 2 desktop licenses and 3 users to FME Enterprise growing our Form user base to 15-20 users and leveraging Flow to serve solutions to the organization.

I started monthly FME Information Sessions to promote and champion the use of FME in the organization and we have grown the sessions to include users from other Conservation Authorities where we can talk technical, where to start, use cases and showcase the latest cool new thing.

Always learning, I achieved FME Professional Certification this year (working on Flow Certification ). I focus on creating scalable, client-friendly solutions that reduce manual work and improve data reliability. I use FME not just as a technical tool, but as a bridge between data complexity and practical, user-friendly solutions. Listening to clients and understating their data story fosters a culture of data literacy and collaboration. And it's fun!

Why did you join the FME Community?

I joined the community to search forum posts and find answers, troubleshoot issues that I might run into, and search and learn from the available resources. 

I have learned so much from everyone in the FME Community - their questions, their answers, troubleshooting together.

Sharing is caring and the user community for FME and Safe is #1. No joke. Folks sharing their love of data, problem solving and just being good humans sharing and supporting each other. A very rare thing indeed. Thank you to everyone who has helped me on my learning journey and I hope to do the same for others.

What tips do you have for users on how to get the most out of the FME Community? 

I would say simply, participate. In my experience, folks in the "data verse", "GIS", Information Technology or analytics tend to be self sufficient problem solvers and researchers - which can be isolating. Have fun and participate. Don't hesitate to learn from others and slowly build a knowledge base (toolbox) of questions that you can answer for other users starting out or new to a particular use case.

If you have run into and solved an issue, someone else surely will run into it and sharing experience helps re-enforce our own learning as well as helping someone else on their journey. This builds community. And it is really important to build our own in our places of work. Support colleagues on their journey and share. We run into each other in forums, conferences, lunch rooms and we build a strong user community by supporting each other.

Tell us about some of the exciting use cases you've built using FME.

The use cases that have been the most fun and rewarding are Report Automations - those that involve working with a client that understands all their data and has a vision. Their challenge is typically how to bring all this data together - different tables, databases, field capture applications, maps, layers, and spreadsheets.

We can talk about the different steps to bring their data together and map them out in a workflow. Then, we’ll create the workbench and go through the results in real time, making changes as needed. There are usually too many ‘oh wow’ and ‘we can do that’ to count!

What's one of your favourite tips or tricks for using FME?

• Think like FME, think in components and workflows.
• Build your toolbox through experience.
• Listen to users to understand how they work and step-by-step what they’re doing.
• Design your FME process as modular building blocks for those steps (i.e., readers, transformers, writers). Each component has a specific job or step and can be reused or swapped independently. Focus on the sequence and flow of data through these components (individual transformers like AttributeManager, Clipper, or Tester) and how data is extracted, transformed, and output step-by-step.

Component thinking helps with modularity and reuse - that’s your toolbox. Workflow thinking helps with clarity, optimization, and automation - that’s your solution.

If you were stranded on an island and could only bring three things with you, what would they be?

Assuming it is a desert island: deck chair, umbrella, and bottomless mojito.

If you could work from anywhere in the world, where would it be?

That desert island we were just talking about sounds pretty great. But seriously...the center of a city with great transportation connections and good climate. I like trains and exploring.