Jim VanderMey

Jim VanderMey is the Chief Innovation Officer for OST. Jim has provided the technical leadership and product strategic planning for the organization since the very beginning. Jim is a technology visionary who sets the long and short-term direction for OST.  As OST has gained an international reputation, Jim has taught and spoken at conferences on a wide variety of topics in Europe, Japan, and throughout North America.

In a non-traditional and entrepreneurial start to his career, Jim started his first IT consulting company when he was in high school in 1980.  He developed insurance agency automation and automated personal lines rating for major insurance carriers with that company while attending the Grand Rapids School of Bible and Music as a pastoral ministry major.   After selling his interest in that firm, Jim went on to manage significant scale applications and infrastructures in the healthcare, manufacturing, and insurance industries. He has served as a consultant to many large organizations such as Herman Miller, Boeing, Priority Health, Magna-Donnelly Corporation, Hewlett Packard, Amway, Meijer, Komatsu, Mercedes, Bissell, Toro, Thomson-Reuters, Navistar (International Truck), Flextronics, the US Navy and dozens of hospital systems around the country including Spectrum Health, Promedica and Baptist Health (Louisville).

Jim has personally performed many of the roles at OST as the company has grown, with his roots in enterprise architecture, performance and capacity planning and data center infrastructure. He is a voracious learner and has held many technical certifications ranging from UNIX and Cisco administration through cloud architecture and design.  As OST has grown and diversified, Jim has engaged with clients on product strategy, Business Alignment and IT transformation, cloud enablement, CIO-level peer consulting, DevOps and IoT program leadership. Creating value by connecting the Data Center disciplines of the past to the Design-centric disciplines and Agile methodologies to help businesses leverage technology more effectively is a place of special focus for Jim in his recent engagements.

Jim represents Health IT as a Commissioner for the State of Michigan Department of Health and Human Services HIT Commission, overseeing and providing feedback on how technology can impact the health and wellbeing of all Michiganders. Jim leads the healthcare practice at OST and is personally engaged with healthcare clients as a CIO consultant for disaster recovery, risk management, digital transformation, modern IT architectures for the Epic EHR, and digital product development.

Jim sits on the advisory board for the computer science/IS departments of Calvin University and Grand Valley State University Computer Science.  He is an avid reader of all types of non-fiction and literature and most mornings can be found paddling a kayak, canoe or SUP before work.  A grandfather of six, spending time with family (can you say ice cream?) and serving with his wife Ann at their church is a major focus on the weekends.