James Smith

Jim Smith has over thirty year’s professional management experience. For the past fifteen years Jim has served as the principal owner and manager of Enterprise Management Group, a management consulting company specializing in corporate wide expense reduction and I/T management. Jim’s primary role with EMG® is leading all “TASK” expense reduction projects, most recently completing a project for American Electric Power, the nation’s largest electric producer. This ten week project generated $289 million in sustainable savings and led to EMG® assuming the role of interim CIO for AEP’s $250 million I/T organization subsequently reducing annual IT costs by an additional $25 million.

Over the past few years, Jim has served as consulting Chief Information Officer for Onvia.com, for March & McLennan’s Seabury & Smith subsidiary, and for Puget Sound Energy. Prior to the Seabury assignment Jim created the Enterprise Project Management organization for The Principal Financial Group. Just prior to their IPO, Principal also retained Jim and EMG to perform the “TASK” expense reduction program achieving a ten percent reduction in operating costs. Prior to this, he was the consulting CIO at Micron Electronics and before that, CIO during the merger of Northern States Power (NSP) and Wisconsin Energy Company (WEC). He reported to the combined NSP and WEC Executive Steering Committee where he was responsible for technology consolidation and defining the search criteria for a permanent Chief Information Officer. While at Micron Electronics Jim led the implementation of EMG’s “TASK” expense reduction process achieving nearly an eighteen percent reduction in corporate wide operating expense.

On other occasions Jim consulted with NSP as a major project auditor performing corrective project management for troubled projects and the “TASK” process. At various times during his assignment with NSP, Jim was responsible for project budgets in excess of one hundred fifty million dollars.

Prior to the NSP engagement, Jim developed the project management division for one of the fastest growing consulting companies in the North West. Before this, Jim worked for a New York consulting company where he had assignments integrating technology into the sales organizations of both Oracle Corporation and XEROX. Jim has also been an independent technology management consultant providing service to banks and other industries in the Northwest.

Before becoming a consultant Jim had a successful career at several large US corporations including GTE, TRW, and Security Pacific Bank.

During his career, Jim has been a presenter at many industry conferences and lectured at MBA programs for USC. He has also given presentations on the business value of computing to IBM’s executives in Belgium and at an IBM customer conference in Nice, France. Jim has also served five years on the board of directors for medical services company.