RANDALL L. JAMES 1721 Jefferson Avenue, Glenview, IL 60025 (Chicago Area) 312-835-4742 [email protected]

A GAME CHANGING CIO

A hands-on business executive and technology visionary with 12+ years of experience as a Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer who has saved my employers over $75 million in direct expenses, while enabling new revenue growth of more than $720 million. CIO experience in insurance, banking, manufacturing, e-commerce, and analytics.

Has a reputation for creativity and maximizing the efficiency, effectiveness, and ROI of all IT assets (hardware, software, staff), and leading “IT turn-around” situations. Recognized by Computerworld as one of the world’s Premier 100 CIO’s.

EDUCATION:

Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, Lake Forest, Illinois Master of Business Administration Graduated in top 5% with Highest Honors as a Hotchkiss Scholar

Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York Bachelor of Science

EXPERIENCE:

IT Performance Experts, Glenview, IL (Chicago area) 2008 to Present President ITPE provides CIO level perspective to SMB clients, including IT Effectiveness Audit's, Technology Evaluation and Selection, IT Strategy Planning and Budgeting, Technology Tuning and Optimization, Part-Time and/or Temporary CIO services, IT Process Improvement, Business Needs Assessment and Cost Justification, and Project Management services.

The core focus is to maximize the value of IT investments (staff, hardware, and software), for competitive business advantage. Sample customer engagements include:

 Technology Evaluation of solid state disk technology for a trading/brokerage firm, demonstrating a 300% increase in throughput, support for more customers, and reduction in application response time.  IT Effectiveness Audit for a chemical supplies distributor, resulting in 5x improved application response and elimination of system downtime. Avoided $250K cost of replacing business system.  IT Effectiveness Audit for a value added reseller. Resolved system stability issues, improved data protection, performance, and system security.

Cosco Industries, Inc., Harwood Heights, IL (Chicago area) 2006 to 2008 Vice President and Chief Information Officer (CIO); VP of Order Management and Customer Service Cosco is the largest provider of custom business stationary, custom stamps, and custom sign products to Staples, Office Depot, and OfficeMax. Led 120 IT professionals, and 100 Order Management and Customer Services staff. $400 million revenue. $10M operating budget, and a $3M capital budget.

 Saved over $4.5M annually, and captured $15M of new revenue via the creation of self service interfaces for over 50,000 customers to order custom stamps, signs, business cards, and stationary, creating over 2,000,000 electronic orders each year from Staples, Office Depot, and OfficeMax.  Architect of an in-store manufacturing system for custom stamps, color signs, and color badges with a $10M incremental revenue potential. When fully deployed, the system will also displace a key competitor at over 3000 locations.  Saved $1.5M over 3 years by stabilizing and expanding the capacity of the existing custom stamp and custom stationary e-commerce platforms by over 20X via tuning and minor configuration changes. Custom sales grew from $3M to $11M annually.  Saved $1.5M via straight-thru processing of custom rubber stamps (eliminated data entry, typesetting, and image grouping), reducing per order costs by 33%, and reducing error rates by 66%.  Reduced order cycle times by 91% (from 72 to 6 hours), increasing on-time shipping to 85%, increasing customer satisfaction to 95%, reduced rush shipping charges by 50%, and reduced customer service costs by 30% ($400K).  Led implementation of new a ERP system to consolidate 5 custom business systems. System reduces costs by $3M annually and provides high quality data to assess opportunities for improved profitability.  Rebuilt the IT Function - replaced 95% of IT and Software development staff, reduced staff by 15%, focused 80% of IT staff on new projects, increased system uptime to 99%+, increased business system performance by 10x.

MBS Insight/World Marketing, Inc. Central Islip (Long Island), New York 2005 to 2006 Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) MBS creates and hosts software that analyzes sales data for high-end, multi-channel retailers (Tiffany, Bloomingdales, Coach, Cole Hahn), creates custom marketing campaigns for each segment, and analyzes customer response (purchases) from each campaign. Led staff of 35 IT professionals.

 Saved $2M in capital, and enabled a significantly improved the competitive position of the company by tuning the existing Oracle based systems to operate at 99.9% uptime and 300% faster - with zero application changes and near zero capital costs.  Saved over $1.5M annually by migrating “home grown” IBM mainframe applications to off-the-shelf software (Unica Affinium, and FirstLogic), increasing the “householding” performance by more than 10x.  Reduced customer update processing time by over 10 hours by modernizing the data center network.  Created a proposal template to enable fast, efficient professional responses to RFQ/RFP/

AMERICO LIFE, INC. and subsidiaries, Kansas City, Missouri 1998 to 2004 Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer (CIO) Americo is a privately held $5.3B (assets), $750M (revenues) life insurance company with 550 employees, 850,000 in-force policies and over 10,000 independent agents. Led IT staff of 50, 3 data centers, $16M technology budget, and a mainframe outsourcing relationship with Computer Sciences Corporation. .

 Saved over $15M annually (15% decrease in operating expenses) by increasing the productivity of over 400 employees by 40%. Eliminated a 6 month backlog of Operations work in 3 weeks.  Saved $5M annually thru the reduction of employee turnover from 67% to 12%. The number 1 reason for employee turnover was because the employees did not have reliable technology to perform their jobs.  Enabled a 660% increase in new business revenues in 3 years (from $67M to $512M annually) as a result of dramatic improvements in agent and customer service levels. Agent and Customer Service to become significant competitive differentiators.  Saved $2.5M with mainframe outsourcing partner Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) by utilizing both on- shore and off-shore (India) development and support resources.  Led the development of a business rules based, laptop/mobile “straight thru” processing system for in-field agents to create “perfect” electronic insurance applications for field agents, saving 20 steps in the workflow and saves 4 days time.  Designed an Internet based Agent Portal providing 10,000 insurance agents with secure, 24x7 access to new application status, commission payment information, debt reports, details of in-force policies, data feeds, sales reports, and electronic libraries of forms, software, and sales tools.  Designed a rules based system to fully automate the assembly of Life Insurance Policies and Annuities. The system eliminates 80% of the steps in the issue process and enables unlimited issue capacity.  Created a sales data mart/business intelligence system to identify sales trends and product pricing issues, resulting in the elimination, replacement, or re-pricing of 15 products (representing 20% of new revenue) that did not meet profit goals.  Managed the company Six Sigma and re-engineering programs. One example was the electronic capture of mainframe generated reports – over 6000 reports were identified, and over 5000 were eliminated.

COMMUNITY FIRST BANCSHARES, INC., Fargo, North Dakota (now Bank of the West) 1996 to 1998 Vice President, Development Community First is Fortune 500, $5.7B (assets), 3000 employee, financial services company with 220 locations. Led 45 employees to support network, server, and desktop hardware and software while the company grew 300% (from 65 to over 220 locations across 13 states) in less than 18 months.

 Eliminated IT as a critical path activity during bank acquisitions by creating a dedicated bank merger team with documented, repeatable methodology, enabling 300% revenue growth in less than 2 years.  Saved over $2.5 million in capital expenditures by deploying state-of-the-art thin client computing (based upon Citrix Winframe / WindowsNT) to 3000 employees in 18 months.  Reduced by 95% the cost, elapsed time, and effort to deploy new applications - from months to hours.  Reduced the number of devices requiring management from 3500+ to less than 60, all in one data center.  Led the complete redesign of the Wide Area Network and positioned the company to integrate voice, fax, video, image, and data across one network.  Active participant in business unit and corporate strategic planning; suggested new strategies (dedicated bank conversion team, standardized retail products, proactive sales culture, leveraging existing customer relationships, 100% electronic banking, image statements, portable mortgages, etc.).  Identified the opportunity to employ new technologies. Analyzed and developed cost/benefit analysis of new technology options including distributed check image capture, Internet Banking, Intranet, voice and video over TCP/IP, etc.  Designed and implemented a new 50,000 square foot data center with a state-of-the-art technology infrastructure and dramatic improvements in reliability. Led the move of all data communications and servers with a total downtime of 3 hours.

UNISYS CORPORATION, Chicago, IL 1994 to 1996 Senior Manager, Information Services National Insurance Practice

DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION, Chicago, IL (now Hewlett Packard) 1980 to 1994 Central Region Operations Manager (2 years)

Professional Services Marketing Manager (2 years)

Professional Services Unit Manager and Consultant: (10 years) RANDALL L. JAMES

HONORS: 2004 Computerworld Premier 100 CIO 1992 Hotchkiss Scholar from Lake Forest Graduate School of Management Eagle Scout

RECENT TRAINING: Effective Boards Situational Leadership II VMware Virtualization Equalogic iSCSI HP Storageworks Harris ERP introduction Introduction to ITIL Sharepoint

CLIENT ADVISORY BOARD MEMBERSHIPS: Computer Sciences Corporation Vantage/One Client Advisory Board Citrix Systems Client Advisory Board Qwest Client Advisory Board DST Systems, Inc. AWD Client Advisory Board XioTech Client Advisory Board Softricity Client Advisory Board (now owned by Microsoft) Bankers Systems Client Advisory Board

SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS: MBS User Group Meeting – Session Speaker DST Systems User Group – Session Speaker Document Sciences Annual User Group Meeting – Keynote Speaker Accord/Loma (Insurance Industry Standards Group) – Session Speaker Society of Insurance Research, - Session Speaker Electronic Document Management In Insurance – Session Speaker Information Technology Inc. (ITI) Large Users Group – Session Speaker

OTHER EXECUTIVE EXPERIENCE OAKHILL DAY SCHOOL, Gladstone, MO (Kansas City area) 1999 to 2005 President of the Board of Trustees and Chief Executive Officer 2003-2005 Trustee 1999-2005 Interim Head of School May-Aug 2004

Oakhill Day School is a $2M (revenues) private, not for profit day school in north Kansas City that provides education to over 260 students, ages 2 through middle school. Based upon standardized tests, the school ranks in the top 1% in the USA.

 Created a financial model of the school.  Led the development of a marketing campaign, increasing enrollment by 30%.  Led the increased use of technology for instruction and administration.  Led a restructuring of the board of Trustees, including downsizing the board and recruiting new board members.  Led the school thru a change of the Head of School. RANDALL L. JAMES

TECHNOLOGY EXPERTISE:

Open Systems Red Hat and Gentoo Linux, Apache, Java, JBOSS, SQLanywhere, , MySQL, Nagios, Cacti, QMail

Microsoft HP Proliant Servers, Dell Servers, IBM servers. Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2005 and SQLServer 2008, SQLIO, IOmeter, Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, Blackberry, Sharepoint, Lotus Notes/Domino, MPIO, Microsoft Office 2003 and Office 2007, Terminal Server, Citrix, Solarwinds, RightFax, Laserfiche, VMware, Softgrid, Trend Micro A/V, Symantic A/V, Alloy license management

Unix HP UX on HP Superdome class servers, Oracle 9i database, PL/SQL, Sun Solaris

IBM AS/400, iSeries, IBM Mainframe, Unisys CICS, VSAM, DB2, VM, OS400, DB400, Mapics ERP, Harris ERP, AWD document imaging and workflow

Storage EMC Symmetrix, EMC/Dell Clariion, Network Appliance, HP Storageworks, XioTech, Texas Memory Systems RamSan Solid State Disk, Dell Equallogic iSCSI SAN, ADIC, Brocade Fibre Channel switches, Qlogic, Emulex

Business Intelligence and Analytics: Crystal Reports, Business Objects Web Intelligence, SAS, Quadstone

Web Technologies: Microsoft IIS, .Net, Javascript, Apache, JBOSS, BEA WebLogic for J2EE, Coldfusion, Flash, Iona Orbix CORBA, Powerbuilder

Data communications: Cisco, Nortel, and HP routers and switches, Fibre Channel, MPLS, Ethernet, ATM, VPNs, TCP/IP, Firewalls, Intrusion Prevention, Fluke OneTouch

Telephony: Avaya 8700, Audix, Call Center CMS/skills based routing, IVR, Intertel, Rolm, and Siemens switches, Voice Over IP (VOIP)

Manufacturing Applications Mapics ERP, Harris Data MRP, Lawson Financials

Marketing Applications: Unica Affinium Campaign, Klondike Marketing Automation, Summit Fulfillment, ClickTactics Britemoon Email marketing

Insurance Applications: Vantage/1, Life/70, Performance Plus, Claims, Underwriting, AWD Document Imaging and Workflow, AWD Customer Relationship Management, Document Sciences xPressions, DocuCorp

Banking Applications: FiServ/ITI Premier, Bankers Systems Rembrant Loan processing, Trust management