FAQ

Keith’s career spans three major sectors: higher education, healthcare and medical research, and global manufacturing. He has served as a senior IT leader in each, most recently focusing on identity and access management strategy in the healthcare space with Radiology Partners.

His interest was sparked in childhood in the San Francisco East Bay Area, where friends’ families owned early Amiga and Atari computers. What started as a love of video games quickly turned into a fascination with optimizing computer performance — a curiosity that eventually grew into a career in IT.

Early in his career, during a tough post-dot-com job market, Keith worked as a supervisor at a Borders bookstore in North Carolina’s Research Triangle. He credits that period with teaching him customer service and supervisory skills that later proved essential in leading large IT teams and serving diverse stakeholders.

Identity and access management is the discipline of ensuring the right people have the right access to the right systems — securely and efficiently. Keith gravitated toward IAM early in his career, first on the University of Iowa’s central IAM team, after seeing firsthand how compliance requirements like HIPAA made secure access control critical in clinical and research environments.

As an IT Systems Administrator at a medical research center, Keith managed secure systems used in clinical and research settings focused on lung imaging, helping enable researchers working toward cures for diseases such as emphysema.

While modernizing research administration processes in higher education, Keith gained early hands-on experience with Agile SCRUM software development and newer web technologies — skills that shaped his approach to running large-scale IT modernization projects later in his career.

Shields Up was a university-wide cybersecurity program Keith helped lead as CISO, applying CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) best practices to safeguard the institution’s network, devices, and business email systems.

A standout example is his leadership of a Multi-Factor Authentication implementation that strengthened security while saving the university $500,000 per year — demonstrating that security investments and operational efficiency can go hand in hand.

Keith led an aggressive implementation of a leading Identity Governance Administration system across North America and EMEA, replacing legacy systems and ensuring SOX compliance. The solution architecture he helped design covered privileged account management, unified single sign-on, and privileged remote access, and he partnered with business leaders to secure critical HR and finance systems across multiple countries.

At Hunter Douglas, he played a key role in launching a business-critical B2B service built on Salesforce, navigating its complex security requirements while managing a blended team of full-time staff, contractors, and implementation partners.

In late 2023, Keith relocated to the Denver Metro Area to be closer to family. He is currently based in Aurora, Colorado.

His blog covers leadership in IT and cybersecurity teams, lessons from a decade in identity and access management, and building digital trust — alongside personal interests like outdoor cycling and fitness.