Jim Matthews
VP of Architecture & Strategy
Charter Communications

James Matthews is currently serving as Vice President of Architecture and Strategy for Charter Communications. Most recently he served as the CIO for the CMS (Central Management Services) Agency of the State of Illinois. In this position James was responsible for architecting and overseeing the rationalization of the IT infrastructure across 50-plus Illinois State Agencies. This initiative reduced the IT spend at the State of Illinois from $665M in FY04 to $535M in FY05 through governance, realignment, technology consolidation, and process improvement. At the same time, the program is positioned to save even more, and will leave the State more agile and better equipped to handle emergent constituent needs.

Prior to this, James focused on large scale Enterprise Architecture strategy. This included: decomposition of IT capability into a series of Reference models that enable a blueprinted approach to solution development, infrastructure management, and Standards development. In addition, he developed the strategies for EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), MDI (Model Driven Integration) based upon XML schema, and Service based patterns at large utility companies. He has identified massive opportunities to improve organizational learning by rationalizing repetitive document-based task deliverables into XML schema that can be managed over time, and mined for business process improvement opportunities. In 1992, James designed and implemented the first SGML-based publishing and workflow system at Ameritech, and was awarded patent number 5,933,841, on August 3, 1999 for the Structured Document Browser that resulted from that work. The browser was deployed to several thousand Customer Service Representatives.

In his early career James led the move to high performance computing platforms and networks at Ameritech. His experience included introduction of the first SMP and RISC UNIX platforms, first Digital VAX clusters, first Fault Tolerant computers in the Chicago area. He served as the Open System strategist, and represented Ameritech on the IEEE POSIX 1003.7 committee. He influenced the first portable application development, based upon POSIX, within the Bell System.

James served in the US Air Force from 1966 – 1970, including service in South East Asia.