Jim VanderMey
Chief Innovation Officer, Vervint
Jim VanderMey is a co-founder of Open Systems Technologies, now called Vervint, a Grand Rapids based information technology reseller and services company.
Jim has provided the technical leadership and strategic vision for the organization since the founding in 1997. Retiring at the end of April, he will continue with Vervint in an Executive Advisor role, supporting the leadership of Vervint during the baton pass of leadership, consulting with clients, and helping in complex organizational technology problems.
Jim has performed many roles as the company has grown, with his roots in enterprise architecture and healthcare in the payer and provider space. As a conference speaker and consultant, he has engaged with global companies and diverse clients in North America, Europe, and Japan in areas such as product strategy, Business Alignment and IT transformation, system performance and architecture, CIO-level peer consulting, advanced analytics and technology in healthcare, medical device development and IoT program leadership.
Vervint takes a perspective on solving both the human and the technology problems simultaneously in client engagements. Jim led the strategy for Vervint to couple Human-Centered Design with our core technology services which resulted in two strategic acquisitions of Grand Rapids-based Visualhero (2016) and the Minneapolis firm Azul Seven (2020). Jim represented Health IT as a Commissioner for the State of Michigan for five years ending in 2023 and was on the working committee for the development of the Michigan Health IT Roadmap (“Bridge to Better Health”). Jim also served on the Advisory Council for the Center for Digital Civil Society at the University of San Diego, and has advised and supported a variety of colleges, universities and startups as they think about the difficult issues and ethics of creating value with technology.
Jim is a father of four children and grandfather to ten, and has been married for 40+ years to his wife Ann. An avid outdoorsman, he enjoys solo wilderness adventures, camping, off roading, paddle boarding, kayaking, and hiking. Ann and Jim are active in mentoring younger couples at their church, where Jim also leads a Faith and Tech initiative and a leadership development program. Additionally, he makes a great homemade soft serve dark chocolate or fresh Michigan strawberry ice cream, both of which are favorites of the grandkids.
On The Schedule
9:00am
45 minutes
Making the Invisible, Visible
The relationship of visible value and invisible value to visible and invisible consequences, from a social standpoint, and how to design for social and organizational consequences at the same time we’re designing for architectures and features. In today’s world of AI, which fundamentally changes how value is delivered through systems, we have to be able to think about the non-functional outcomes of the system and the external dependencies in new ways. I will demonstrate and give examples of a construct that allows us to do that.