Keith Brooks - IBM Impact 2014 - TheCUBE
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2014-04-28

Keith Brooks, ThinkRite, at IBM Impact 2014 with John Furrier and Paul Gillin

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Broadcasting live from the IBM Impact conference at the Venetian Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE welcomed the Social Strategist and Social Business Practice Manager for ThinkRite, Keith Brooks. Co-hosts John Furrier and Paul Gillin asked Brooks about the power of Big Data and analytics and how his company is capitalizing on these ever more important trends.

Having attended IBM Impact last year, Brooks compared the two editions saying IBM has refocused themselves to the future of business and its practices, whereas last year they seemed stuck in a mindset that was too focused on the past. “It just seems like everything gelled together and IBM acknowledged they understood the realities and are now on a path to lead people,” he said.

With the revelation IBM has invested upwards of $25 billion on analytics over the past few years, Gillin asked Brooks if he could share how ThinkRite is cornering a market that many might not have seen as being viable contender in the analytics field.

Watch the interview in its entirety here:

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“ThinkRite,” Brooks began, “is working on a product to take your conference calls and meetings and pull analysis out of those meetings for you.”

Their product would not only help to coordinate your schedule, advising when you had upcoming meetings, but would provide all relevant information for accessing them as well.

“We have a product called the ThinkRite Assistant. It looks at your schedule, finds all of your meetings and notifies you a few minutes in advance,” Brooks explained. Additionally, the ThinkRite Assistant provides you with the bridge number or web meeting number and has a template allowing you to take notes during the call. All information collected during the meeting, such as your notes, other participants, etc., is collected and analyzed.

“What we do on the back end,” Brooks continued, “is that we now have your attendee list. We provide you the contact details for that attendee list. At the end of that, you can take all of those notes and save them or send them to whoever you want.”

ThinkRite, as a management solution, helps companies to identify the ratio of productivity for individuals in organizations to their time spent in meetings.

Gillin posited whether or not this technology could find corollaries outside of the meeting structure described by Brooks. “It could be used at a macro HR level to help identify who are your top performers,” Gillin stated. “Are you seeing technology being used the way you’ve described being applied to the personnel process on a large scale? Are we opening that floodgate of a new way to do hiring and staff deployment,” he asked.

The benefit of applying this technology, according to Brooks, is that in the long run you will see companies that can drill down to a much leaner profile thanks to maximized productivity. “You will find that people become very niche in their company,” he stated.

ThinkRite believes employing an analytics solution within an organization will help to realize specific strengths of individual members.

Even though this was only the second year Brooks had attended IBM Impact, Furrier asked him to share why this conference should be considered important.

“If you’re working on massive transactional systems, this is the conference you want to be at. The people you are going to meet here have written most of it, worked on it and are expanding it based on what you need in the field.” He went on to comment that if, at the start of the conference, you were unsure which direction you wanted to go, you most likely know where you want to go now.