Jim Longson Email & Phone Number

Greater Chicago Area

Completed a project to upgrade the Excel/PowerPoint/VBA presentation system for Lincoln International, an investment bank with 18 offices in 14 countries advising sellers of mid-market businesses.

Sugar Grove, Il

Wrote VBA code in an Office 365 Enterprise environment to provide sales leads and project management for a manufacturer of water and sewer valves in municipal and industrial markets. The project involved gathering information by web scraping and building a shared web database through Access and SharePoint in Office 365.

Aurora, Il

Reduced page loading time of the Linux/PHP Pinnacle Cart e-commerce system by half. Increased traffic by using part numbers to add thousands of landing pages and used sorting, price and product filters to return landing pages that matched requested price and product features.

Independent consultant with experience solving problems caused by slowing revenue growth, increasing costs and aging computer systems.Client sizes range from startups and small businesses to educational institutions and major corporations.Activities include strategic planning, project management, Internet development and investment due diligence.

Merged an educational software company facing intense price and channel competition from Microsoft with two other similar companies to create the largest educational software publisher at that time. The company, acquired for $57 million 3 years earlier, was valued at $106 million in the merger.

Turned around an educational software company facing intense price and channel competition from Microsoft by:-Refocusing on core products-Immediately eliminating unrelated activities-Cutting staffing by 1/3-Reorganizing product development to meet release schedules-Adding pioneering online capabilities-Restoring the brand image, with positive media reviews and awards

-Initiated and managed a venture fund to provide Tribune Company early access to strategic capabilities in applying technology to customer needs. The fund included:=AOL=StarSight Telecast (Patent on cable channel guides, now part of Macrovision)=Picture Network International (Online licensing of stock photos, now part of Kodak)=Peapod (Online grocery shopping, now part of Royal Ahold)=CheckFree (Online bill payment, now part of Fiserv)and was valued at $250 million when I left the company in 1996.-Proposed and managed activities for the Board's Technology Advisory Committee

-Developed and implemented Tribune Company’s strategy to build and exploit market driven technology capabilities, which allowed it to become one of the few media companies to profit from thegrowth of the Internet in the late 1990’s.

-Took responsibility for Marketing and Strategic planning for the New York Daily News, the largest daily newspaper in the United States, during a period of labor strife. Developed innovative marketing strategies and consumer research to understand The Daily News' audience, retailer needs and future trends and implemented a retail growth strategy to allow advertisers to leverage increasing diversity in the NYC market..

-Outsourced MIS operations to the Tribune Company data center, upgrading applications, eliminating MIS FTE's in NY and reducing annual MIS costs for the NY Daily News-Replaced obsolete newspaper and advertising publishing systems with systems proven in other markets.-Maintained MIS and production system operations throughout a strike lasting several months.-Chaired newspaper industry’s “Opportunities and Strategies” task force, in 1988-89, which identified the underlying forces that would eventually turn the Internet into a major competitive threat. Thiseffort contributed to the growth of newspaper online initiatives in the 1990’s and the emergence of newspaper driven advertising services like Careerbuilder.com and Cars.com.

-Consolidated information systems across Tribune Company over 8 years, first by standardizing investments in systems, networks and telecommunications and then selectively centralizing applications in a corporate data center, resulting in reduced capital expenditures, lower staffing requirements and faster deployment of strategic applications to business units.-Restored a declining news services company to profitability and long-term growth by relocating operations from Manhattan to reduce costs, creatively renegotiating a licensing agreement to save a key talent from a competitor, and acquiring a related business to increase revenue from existing customers and attract new customers.

-Took responsibility for a $20 million system development project, after 3 years of delay and the primary vendor had declared bankruptcy, by reducing scope to essential features, negotiating favorable terms with the vendor and reorganizing the project team. The system was in operation within a year and functioned for another decade.

-Progressively developed the premier IT organization in Tribune Company, developing staff, installing modern news, advertising, distribution and financial systems and enabling growth of profits and market share.-Developed long-range strategic plan and financial models that secured a $40 million investment in new printing and packaging facilities that provided a foundation for two decades of solid growth. ROI exceed expectations within the first year.-Initiated electronic publishing alliances with Time-Warner's local cable systems.

Brought experience with IBM 360 Assembler Language and COBOL to facilitate development of online systems for trucking and help the organization make the transition to modern information systems.