Welcome to our October 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: Kenneth Øyen-Eriksen |
What company do you currently work for?
Geodata AS
What's your current job role and title?
Strategic Advisor and FME customer relations manager
Tell us more about what you do and how you use FME?
Role at Geodata: I work as a Strategic Advisor, partnering with large organizations to help them extract maximum value from their GIS and data management investments. My focus is on translating technology into tangible business outcomes, higher data quality, time and cost savings, more efficient workflows, and happier end users. I bridge the gap between technical capabilities and strategic goals, guiding customers through digitalization journeys.
How I use FME: I use FME both hands-on and as a strategic tool in customer dialogues. On the practical side, I use it to automate repetitive data tasks and integrate data from multiple sources, turning complex data challenges into streamlined, reliable pipelines.
I have been working with FME for approximately 8-9 years, starting with what was then FME Desktop and FME Server, now evolved into FME Form and FME Flow/Flow Hosted. Today I work at Geodata, which operates the largest FME environment in Norway, giving me a unique vantage point on how FME scales across complex, enterprise-level data ecosystems.
Beyond my own use, I co-host a monthly FME webinar series called BufferZonen together with my colleague Antonio, one of our senior FME consultants. The series is aimed at helping customers and the broader GIS community discover new ways to leverage FME in their workflows.
What excites me most right now is the direction FME is heading with AI integration and MCP connections. These capabilities open up possibilities that most organizations haven’t even imagined yet, automating not just data processing, but intelligent decision-making and cross-system orchestration. I see this as a major opportunity to help customers leap forward in their digitalization, and it’s a key part of the conversations I’m having with clients today.
How has the FME Accelerator or Community changed the way you work?
Why did you join the FME Community?
To get tips, tricks, ideas, help and more. I often find the answer within the Community faster than figuring it out myself or contacting someone internally or at Safe.
What tips do you have for users on how to get the most out of the FME Community?
Get engaged, be open, ask questions, come with an idea or just soak in the answers and ideas for others. Maybe you get some «aha» moments to do things yourself.
Tell us about some of the exciting use cases you've built using FME.
In collaboration with a colleague, I developed a self-service data portal built on FME Flow, combining automated backend workspaces with a user-friendly web interface. The solution features Azure AD authentication for secure access management, user administration, and role-based access control. The portal enables business users, regardless of technical background, to seamlessly upload and download data and files, trigger automated quality assurance processes, and publish validated data directly to a database or convert it to a specified file format.
The result is measurably higher data quality, reduced support burden on the GIS department, and increased operational efficiency, empowering end users to self-serve with confidence and freeing up technical resources for higher-value work.
What's one of your favourite tips or tricks for using FME?
I have many, but bookmarks plus annotations to keep workspaces readable and maintainable, especially when handing them over to colleagues. PS! Could also be extensive use of the AttributeManager as a Swiss army knife to to replace multiple transformers with one clean step.
If you were stranded on an island and could only bring three things with you, what would they be?
1. A good and sharp knife
2. Unlimited supply of good coffee (non-negotiable for a coffee lover), and enjoying the coffee while FME does the work in the cloud or somewhere else.
3. My wife, there is probably no way around it, but to bring her.
If you could work from anywhere in the world, where would it be?
Hard to beat Norway for work-life balance, even if the coffee requires a bit more effort to source! And you can get both fjords, mountains, fast internet, good beer, and be close to friends.
Would you like to be featured on Spotlight of the Month? Fill out this form here.
We’ll see you next month! 😊