Coruzant Technology

ZeroedIn’s Vice President of Client Services, Keith Goode, joins Coruzant Technologies for the Digital Executive podcast. Keith shares his extensive career in engineering and technology, particularly data. Today, he leads a formidable team at ZeroedIn Technologies where he helps his clients find hidden gems about their company’s most valuable asset – their people.

Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.

[00:00:12] Brian Thomas: Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Keith Goode. Keith Goode has been the Vice President of Client Services for more than 10 years, where he leads the implementation and support efforts of the ZeroedIn platform used to transform HR, talent, and business data into actionable intelligence.

Previously, Keith held various management consulting and corporate roles at General Dynamics, Aon Hewitt, and Saba, with over 20 years delivering human capital management and business intelligence solutions. Keith finds it exciting to deploy tools and techniques such as data mining, collective listening, machine learning, and predictive modeling in a platform that solves real world HR and business issues.

Well, good afternoon, Keith. Welcome to the show.

[00:00:54] Keith Goode: Thanks, Brian. It’s a pleasure to be here, looking forward to jumping right into the conversation.

[00:00:58] Brian Thomas: Awesome. And I appreciate that. This is something I was really looking forward to today as well as having that conversation with you, which is awesome.

I get to not only meet you, but also hear your story. And obviously, with your permission, we get to share this with our global audience, which is awesome. So, Keith, jumping in let’s talk about your career in technology as an engineer, product manager, Senior Executive, and now the Vice President of Client Services at ZeroedIn Technologies.

Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?

[00:01:30] Keith Goode: Yeah, so my passion and expertise lies with generating value from data. And I’m particularly excited about the opportunities that can be found in HR analytics. I have to admit though, the current state of HR analytics, kind of reminds me of high school sex. Yep, everyone’s talking about it. No one really knows how to do it, and everyone thinks everyone else is doing it. So, they claim to be doing it as well. But in any case, the amount of data in this space is growing at a high rate. And every day I’m thinking of new ways that the data can be used to add value to our clients.

I’ve worked with a wide range of both public and private organizations across industries, such as retail, health and banking. The issues are similar, but the solutions really have to fit each organization’s uniqueness. And many times this requires expertise and tools for data, cleaning, aggregation, model generation.

All of which really the geek in me enjoys. However, the secret is being able to say yes to those unique requirements but deliver in an effective and sustainable way. And I’m sure with your career, you can relate to this.

[00:02:38] Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Appreciate that. Appreciate the analogy as well. People do claim they know everything about analytics, and I’ve talked to a ton of people, as you know, on this podcast and some people get it.

Some people don’t. I really do appreciate you explaining that and obviously delivering unique services is sometimes hard to do. But if you can deliver those on time, you’re going to win your clients every single day. So, thanks again for that, Keith. Keith, moving on here, everybody touts having the best analytics and visualization platform as we just talked about from Microsoft, their Power BI, Salesforce, et cetera.

Could you share what makes your platform stand out from the rest?

[00:03:16] Keith Goode: Yeah, they certainly do, but I think ZeroedIn stands out because we’re flexible, easy to use and results driven. And this is shown by our clients, such as the City of Detroit, Department of Defense and specifically, ZeroedIn analytics platform leverages a unique and flexible data model to provide the ability to aggregate, normalize and visualize data from across both HR and other business systems.

We provide a single source of truth, and this allows users to gain access to trustworthy information that’s immediately drillable, configurable, and tailored to specific business needs. In addition, we’ve had an integrated surveying tool. We can easily correlate the qualitative data with the qualitative data, and this provides a deeper understanding for our clients’ workforce.

And all of this again is coupled with our service offerings with people like me who become an extension to our client’s team.

[00:04:11] Brian Thomas: I love that again, a lot of people just want their data, right? It’s their data, but there’s always a bottleneck or somebody owns it. Right. But the fact that you are an extension, your services are an extension to the platform, makes it even better. There’s a lot of people obviously that didn’t go to school or didn’t get trained in analytics, and this is something that they desperately need. So I appreciate your sharing.

Keith. We all agree I just mentioned that the customer’s data is their data. Unfortunately, there’s always a bottleneck with the data custodian report writer, lack of training, we talked about. How do you overcome this bottleneck?

[00:04:46] Keith Goode: Yeah, I’ve seen these bottlenecks in action. And did I mention that I’ve done work in the Federal Government? I think I mentioned that before. So, I’ve seen these bottlenecks and really there are three main takeaways on how we solve these.

And I think the first one is leveraging existing APIs and data sources. So, we don’t make our clients conform to our requirements. In most cases, clients already have data that’s being accessed, so we would just leverage what they currently have. And in some cases, we’ll actually deploy our platform within the client’s processing environment.

This reduces a lot of risk, and you don’t see a lot of this anymore. Yes, we do have our hosted solution, and that’s where a lot of our clients. Wanna be, but if there’s additional risks we can actually deploy behind, within their processing environment. I think the second is flexibility. So, unlike some of our competitors our analytics model flexes to accommodate our client’s processes and integrates in any internal and external outside data sources like sales, operations, unemployment, data benchmarking.

Benchmark information we’ve actually brought in weather data and been able to correlate it to performance for specific job roles. And then 3rd, I would say services, and I mentioned this before our subscription model includes free access to our client’s concierge team to develop customer predictors and to ensure they reach their full potential of their investment.

This team is made up of people with average years’ experience in technology and statistics of over 10 years. And again, they become an extension to the client team.

[00:06:22] Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Again, highlighting the service that concierge obviously makes a huge difference for your clients and their comfort level of reaching out and getting that assistance.

And the fact that you are just the versatility adaptability of your platform for your clients’ needs is just awesome. Love that. Keith. Last question of the day we are a technology podcast publication, and we ask every guest, you’re obviously leveraging some of that new and emerging tech in your tech stack. Is there anything you might be able to highlight for us today?

[00:06:53] Keith Goode: Yeah, over my 10 years here at ZeroedIn, I’ve been really impressed with the team’s ability to embrace new technologies and how it can impact our client’s business because we have a flexible architecture, we’ve been able to introduce generative AI, like LLM -Large Language Models, so users can gain information about their workforce in a conversation, like having a conversation with our system. We are using the latest machine learning algorithms to build client configured predictive models. For example, predicting people who are at risk of leaving their organization. This can be a huge savings.

As you know, machine learning algorithms learn from the data as to what features are important for any given prediction. Now, this provides a much more accurate prediction, but it often leaves the end user scratching their head to determine why one prediction Is different than another. That is why we’ve taken this a step further and introduced what we call explainable AI.

This allows the client to determine for each prediction what features were more important than others in making that prediction. We also perform a lot of text analytics for sentiment analysis across our surveying platform. This provides our clients with. Deeper insights, especially in those open-ended question responses, without this clients often just stop looking at those open ended responses, that’s losing potential value and they’re surveying effort.

[00:08:17] Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. I love this whole year, 2023 has been all about AI and the fact that you’re obviously on the cutting edge, leveraging large language models and predictive modeling to help your customers really move that needle forward. That’s just amazing. Love that stuff here.

Obviously, we talk about it every day on the podcast. So, thank you Keith, it was a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.

[00:08:42] Keith Goode: Thank you so much, Brian. It’s been a pleasure here and to your listeners. I’d like to write just three couple take away thoughts.

One, there’s no magic wand to get it done. The devil’s definitely in the detail and you got to get in there and aggregate data. And sometimes that may include data cleaning, and second, what gets measured gets funded. So having a measurement strategy for any initiative will happen.

It’s funding and knowledge is power, but it’s only when we apply it to that we truly see change and growth. So, I hope you’re your listeners found some value in our conversation. And if they’d like, they can, can reach out to me anytime. I’m always open to extend the conversation. I can be reached at LinkedIn at Keith A.

Good or our website, which is ZeroedIn. Com. Again, I’m always happy to continue the conversation.

[00:09:31] Brian Thomas: Amazing. Bye for now.