Josh Jacobs
Senior Director
Business and Management
Alvarez and Marsal
Poland
Biography
Josh Jacobs is a Senior Director with Alvarez & Marsal in Chicago, with more than 15 years of technology experience focusing on strategy and delivery of enterprise class IT solutions including: multi-channel, mobile, cloud-based and e-commerce solutions. He specializes in enabling large scale, global, enterprise solutions across a variety of industries including retail, insurance financial markets and automotive industries. He has in-depth knowledge in many technologies and a unique ability to understand the customer needs. Recently, Mr. Jacobs led an infrastructure and data center assessment and remediation plan for a $50 billion health care provider. This action plan enabled broad transformation within the infrastructure operations group to reduce cost and increase overall throughput by streamlining processes, improving reporting and data quality, and aligning with the application development teams to reduce overall deployment outages. He also led a comprehensive IT and multi-channel assessment of the largest U.S. outdoor retailer, focusing on applications, infrastructure, data and organization optimization. The assessment yielded over 30 actionable recommendations across both IT and the business to maximize the current investment, enabling future business capabilities and providing cost optimization. Mr. Jacobs led a team to restructure and operationalize the multichannel organization for a Fortune Top 50 retailer. This involved improving executive reporting and decision making, creating more structured and real-time financial data as well as creating various models that allowed the C-suite to understand the resource capacity of the enterprise. After the build-phase was complete, his team transitioned the work offshore to maximize the cost going forward. He was the global technical delivery lead for a major U.S. retailer’s multi-channel global ecommerce and ERP strategy and implementation. He led the overall delivery of 41 enterprise applications, as well as the re-platform of the new suite of applications, mobile site, web content management platform and infrastructure consolidation and datacenter build out. He successfully led teams in Canada, the U.S., London and India, resulting in the launch of the solution and an increased desire of other geographies to implement this platform – currently the global ecommerce standard for the company. Internally at A&M, Mr. Jacobs is part of the National Ecommerce Advisory Board formed by several former executives from Amazon. Mr. Jacobs earned a bachelor of science degree in computer information systems and International business from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. He speaks fluent Spanish. He also sits on the Presidents Council for the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and is the Chairman of the Museum’s Digital Strategy group.
Research Interest
Josh Jacobs has 15+ years of technology experience focusing on strategy and delivery of enterprise class IT solutions Specializes in enabling largescale, global, enterprise solutions across industries including retail, insurance financial markets and automotive In-depth knowledge in many technologies and a unique ability to understand customer needs
