J. Alex Lang Email & Phone Number

Monroeville, Pennsylvania, Us

Transtar, LLC owns several shortline railroads in the northeast and midwest. Historically owned by US Steel, we call it a "140-year old startup company", as USS spun us off in 2021. My position was created in order to establish an entirely-new IT environment for the newly-independent company. I was able to create a new IT team, manage the data migration, and stand up a new network and several enterprise software packages.

My wife and I purchased this venerable rail-themed B&B in order to restore its legacy as the east coast's pre-eminent railfan destination. Just minutes from world-famous Horseshoe Curve, the B&B provides comfortable lodging and hot breakfasts to up to 26 people per night. Our recently-renovated event space is available for meetings and special events. This year, the Inn celebrated its 30th Year of operations with a community block party held in July.

Carload Express, Inc. is a privately held freight railroad holding company with operations in five states. 105 employees, 344 route-miles, 90,000 revenue carloads per year. Carload doubled in size in 2016 due to acquisition of rail lines in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia that were spun off by Norfolk Southern.- Oversee and support the locomotive mechanical, customer service, and information technology departments.- Manage Carload’s fleet of 50 EMD locomotives through a staff of 7 mechanics and supervisors. Ensure regulatory compliance, oversee daily operations. Manage locomotive capital projects including rebuild and refurbish utilizing major rebuild facilities. Directly manage Positive Train Control implementation, including locomotive onboard (including Alstom cab signal), back-office, procurement, and contracts. - Enable continued expansion and scalability of Carload Express by managing all aspects of technology through a combination of outsourced and in-house software and IT support services.- Oversee Customer Service team, consisting of a Customer Service Manager and three Customer Service Representatives. - As a member of Carload Express’ executive team, I also contribute to commercial policy & analysis, support marketing & corporate communications efforts, and use my rail industry knowledge to assess and develop various strategic and commercial opportunities.

- In 2014 & 2015, I led initiatives to overhaul the corporate network and server infrastructure, update Carload Express’ website, improve customer service, and deploy nine AEI (RFID) car reader systems. Renegotiated telephone and Internet service contracts. Selected new IT managed services provider. Replaced all network and firewall equipment.- In 2016, I played a crucial role in the startup of Carload’s newest railroad, the 162-mile Delmarva Central Railroad, where I oversaw all information technology, radio communications, customer service, and public relations initiatives needed for the startup of operations.- I led incremental improvements to our utilization of Wabtec (formerly GE) RailConnect TMS, used to track and invoice over 90,000 rail shipments per year. Implemented custom reporting tool and developed many reports.

Freelance business providing primarily web & photographic services to small businesses. Design and host web sites, provide marketing consultation. Additional specialization in railroad photography, including Fortune 500, regional railroad, and tourist railroad clients.

Pittsburgh, Pa, Us

Responsible for overseeing and improving central IT processes for deploying production-ready systems, while appropriately balancing IT security risks, technology architecture goals, and the needs of the business. During my time in this role, I more than doubled process efficiency, while improving transparency, consistency, and participant education. In addition, I served as an analyst for several ServiceNow ITSM initiatives at Carnegie Mellon.

Pittsburgh, Pa, Us

• Manage a team of 16 full-time staff and contractors that provides in-person and remote IT support for 1500 administrative staff, including executive support, desktop management infrastructure, and internal tools support. Manage budget and cost recovery model for approx. $1M in expenses.• Negotiating and developing new support & chargeback model, while implementing a variety of internal support tools and expanding services & support.• Manage procurement of software, hardware, and consulting services. Contract administration and negotiation, product/service evaluation and selection.• Served in analyst role for campus email & calendar migration to Microsoft Exchange.

Pittsburgh, Pa, Us

Responsible for strategic and tactical planning, budgeting, and staffing for IT/business support systems for campus housing, dining, retail, parking, printing, etc totalling $60M in business.

Pittsburgh, Pa, Us

- Primary system administrator for twenty 24x7 production Solaris and Red Hat Linux servers including Apache 1.3, Tomcat, Vignette Application Portal 7, Remedy 5, Oracle 8i, and a variety of Perl, Java, and PHP applications. This server group supports most internal and external web content for Carnegie Mellon’s campuses worldwide including over 40,000 active users and over 6 million page views per month.- Project manager and lead developer for custom content management system upgrade for www.cmu.edu supporting 300 content creators in 50 academic and administrative units across three campuses.- Implemented a consolidated web logging and reporting project using Perl and Google Urchin 5.0 to assist in marketing campaign tracking.- Manage customer and vendor relationships, provide expert-level customer service, and support University web initiatives with technical, marketing and outreach skills.

Pittsburgh, Pa, Us

- Coordinated a six-month campus-wide network upgrade affecting 10,000 users in over 40 buildings, including negotiation of all scheduling with constituents, communication of planned outages, and served as the lead customer contact.- Analyzed, interpreted, and reported on service, demographic, and survey data in support of decision-making for Carnegie Mellon’s Computing Services Division, using Oracle 8i, Microsoft Access, Perl and XML. - Analyzed usage of central printing system, resulting in implementation of a new system that has reduced printing costs by $100,000 annually. - Coordinated ongoing customer outreach activities with technical customer groups, via monthly forums, web sites, and mailing lists.- Performed marketing analyses of targeted campus users via one-on-one interviews, facilitated focus groups, and web-deployed surveys.

Pittsburgh, Pa, Us

- Managed IT activities for the 10 departments within the Division of Student Affairs, such as strategic planning, web presence, office computing, and security.- Managed all aspects of software development life cycle, including requirements gathering and analysis, design, testing, and quality assurance. - Managed a $50,000 software & equipment budget, as well as billing to departments for technical projects.- Designed and created database-backed web applications for the Division of Student Affairs using IIS 5.0, ColdFusion MX, and SQL Server 7, including identity management and authorization services. - Administered six Win2K Servers, including IIS 5, SQL Server 7, and ColdFusion MX.- Managed implementation of student information system supporting 4000 international students to support Federal mandate (SEVP/SEVIS). Purchased, configured, and secured Win2K server and desktop hardware and software. Performed data migration and configured peer-system EDI using XML and XSLT.

San Jose, Ca, Us

- Designed and developed a Computer-Based Training package using Java Swing applications, servlets, JDBC, Borland JBuilder 4, and Oracle 8.1. - Gathered requirements, designed, and developed a Perl web application to facilitate communication between labor, management, and engineering across three shifts in multiple locations, resulting in cost savings of $100,000. Wrote all documentation, conducted end-user training for 250 users.- HP UX system administration including backup and recovery, shell scripting, and configuration of Apache and Samba. HP UX System & Network Administration training.

Msit, It Management

Bmus, Music Technology