Personas Behind the Brand
Today’s featured leader: Phil Goerdt
Welcome back to another exciting installment in our leadership blog series, ‘Personas behind the brand’. Today, we feature Phil Goerdt, Director of Cloud Architecture at Onix.
Phil’s journey began in banking before moving into consulting. Around 2015, Phil got more hands-on with cloud technologies, later shifting his focus to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Phil worked at Google for several years where he helped the largest GCP customers migrate, build and run their workloads as a delivery lead and enterprise architect. Phil has worked across many industries including Financial Services, Manufacturing, Retail, Insurance, Telecom, and Healthcare. At Onix, Phil oversees technical delivery leadership with our customers, creating technical delivery frameworks for our teams, and defining new patterns and products.
Join us as we delve into Phil’s wealth of knowledge and experiences in the ever-evolving realm of cloud technology and technical delivery.
Q. What motivated you and excited you to join the Onix team?
We have an incredible opportunity to evolve Onix into a strong partner across the cloud domain. Helping lead that charge from a technical delivery perspective was really exciting.
Q. As the Director of Cloud Architecture at Onix, how do you plan to leverage your expertise to drive innovation and differentiate Onix from its competitors?
I like to say “fall in love with the problem, not the solution”. When we listen to our customers and really understand their problems, we can start to push the envelope of what is possible. Being a technical expert is only one part of the equation.
Q. How does your past experience at Google help you to succeed in your role at Onix and in accelerating Onix’s partnership with Google Cloud?
I have a deep network of friends and previous colleagues at Google, which can help us stay up to date on what’s happening in the ecosystem and get the right support if we need it. Having been on the other side of the partnership also means I have an understanding of the processes that the Googlers are working with.
Q. Cloud technologies are constantly evolving. How do you stay up-to-date with the latest advancements and trends?
It’s definitely hard to keep up! I have some personal side projects where I write code and build things; being hands-on really helps me solidify my understanding. Podcasts and blogs are also great for learning when on the go.
Q. Onix aims to provide innovative cloud solutions to its customers. Can you share an example of a unique solution to a customer problem you have designed and implemented in your current or previous roles?
We’re seeing a lot of potential in the Healthcare space, and it’s one where we have the opportunity to positively impact people’s lives and their health. We’ve been working with a client to simplify the patient intake form process, which leads to a better patient experience at the clinic and better data capture for things like family history. Small changes like this can lead to big impacts and future initiatives.
Q. How do you assess the cloud maturity of new clients and develop tailored strategies to assist them in their cloud adoption journey?
There are some tools that can help accelerate understanding of where a client is on the maturity curve and their journey, but the best way is just having a conversation. This is a journey and we need to know where the client wants to go. From there we can determine what roadblocks or speedbumps are present, if there are accelerators that can help, or must-have capabilities. Starting with a business objective almost always leads to a better outcome when we do these roadmap and strategy sessions.
Q. How do you envision artificial intelligence (AI) shaping the future of business? What opportunities and challenges do you anticipate in harnessing the power of AI for customers?
I think AI will remove a lot of toil and undifferentiated heavy lifting from people’s jobs – this will allow them to focus on more productive and high value work, which is really exciting in my opinion. I think a lot of the challenges are going to come from the data aspects of ML and AI, with questions like “who owns the training data?”, “how can we prove repeatability in inferences?”, or “is this compliant with local regulations and rules of use?”. The devil’s in the details when it comes to implementation and long term adoption.
Q. The field of AI is rapidly evolving. How do you plan to ensure that Onix remains at the forefront of AI innovation while also being responsible?
Keeping our ears to the ground in terms of advancements is critical. We need to understand what the new capabilities are. It’s up to us to ensure that we are implementing it in a responsible manner and focusing on use cases that are providing benefit to the user.
FUN BYTES
Q. What is one recent technological advancement or scientific discovery that has fascinated or inspired you, and why?
I think Deepmind’s AlphaFold model is really incredible; the ability to predict protein structure is a huge accelerator for pharmaceutical and biotech companies. It’s inspiring to think that this technology along with bioinformatics and genetics data could create personalized treatments for patients.
Q. If you could build an AI assistant for yourself, what would be its unique capabilities and how would it help you in your daily life and work?
I’m not sure how unique this is, but I would love an AI assistant that can take a script and turn it into a beautiful slide deck or could summarize all my emails and tell me which ones need action!
We hope you enjoyed these unique insights from our top leadership! Stay connected for more inspiring views, interviews, and industry-leading solutions from Onix.
