IDC Enterprise Innovation Awards 2009

2009 was a challenging year for most CIOs, where rationalizing ICT for the right cost and the right quality remained top priority. Last year's winners demonstrated their tenacity and vision to align ICT with the needs of business users in challenging times, and showed how ICT provides a competitive advantage in business. Certainly, the 2009 winners showed that there are now more ways to deliver business services and to overcome the complexity in people, technology and process management. IDC Enterprise Innovation Awards 2009 winners showed their readiness to innovate via cloud computing, software as a service, asset management, service-oriented management, GIS, mashups, and embraced other interesting approaches to tackling business needs.

Below is a snapshot of the top 10 IDC Enterprise Innovation Award 2009 winners:

Start nominating now for the annual IDC Enterprise Innovation Awards 2010.

CIO of the Year Award 2009
MTR Corporation
Daniel Lai, CIO of MTR Corporation in Hong Kong, believes that efficient and control in asset management is a key discipline to aid his group in managing the many projects that have tough timelines and budgeting control issues in different geographies. MTR has leveraged IT to rapidly expand overseas by enabling easy transfer of its world-class public transport expertise. Technology partners include PCCW and HP.

Winning Dynamic IT:
- IT-enabled business expansion
- Self-developed asset management platform into product form
- Governance and IT dashboard to optimize and prioritize IT resources

Daniel Lai has also bagged the IDC CIO of the year award by excelling in areas of strategy, team leadership, execution and influence in the enterprise. Under his leadership, his IT organizations has significantly transformed from a cost centre to a strategic profit making organizations to help boost business growth. Building IT into the DNA of business is a key success trait of his winning formula.
Altium Limited
CIO Alan Perkins leveraged technology partners Salesforce, Google, Amazon, Delphi and Morfik to support the growth of Altium, an electronics design software company.

Winning Dynamic IT:
- Leveraging the Software as a Service paradigm to increase scalability
- Tapped cloud computing (EC2, S3, CloudFront, Google Apps, Intacct, etc.) as a business platform and to support internal functions
Bharti Airtel
Dr Jai Menon, director (Customer service and IT) and Rupinder Goel (pictured), Bharti Airtel and Group CIO of Bharti Enterprises, in India emphasized the need on operational efficiency while ensuring standardization in a constant changing environment. The business support system transformation project which entails 15000 man months and include technology partners like IBM, Comverse, Oracle, Nortel etc, is a concerted effort to rejuvenate business support to various channels and to avoid bottlenecks in business execution. Such major effort paves the wave to prepare the enterprise for integration with their business in Mobility business and other line of Business telemedia and Enterprise Services.

Winning Dynamic IT:
- Highly scalable architecture for BSS and leverage of EAI middleware to integrate across 17 major systems.
- Business Process reengineering across opportunity, campaign, sales, marketing, customer service, analytics and many other areas.
Gen-i
Steve Osborn, Service Line Manager, Client Technologies of Gen-i, had the objective of becoming the first provider in Asia/Pacific to offer not just processing but also storage and application services in an "on-demand" grid-based model. Technology partners that they worked with include Novell, IBM, Microsoft, Dell and AMD. Rapid response to customers are important and their cloud infrastructure offered customers profile-based provisioning with security and scalability. New user environments can now be created in less than 15 minutes.

Winning Dynamic IT:
- Grid-based supercomputing center
- Cloud services model
- Virtual infrastructure enabling real-time customer service delivery
Haier
Helen Xie, CIO and head of Process & System Innovation in China, believes in business transformation with IT, as evidenced by their commitment in their "1,000-day" transformation exercise which entails revisiting almost all segments within the enterprise, from process to organization and systems. Objective to move toward a near-zero inventory model led Haier to work with vendors like SAP, HP and Siemens.

Winning Dynamic IT:
- Re-engineering of supply chain to an on-demand model leveraging fully integrated ERP and enterprise application integration
- Product lifecycle management (PLM) revamp to shorten the product time to market and enable modular SOA design and production
Land Transport Authority
Rosina Howe-Teo, LTA’s group direction and chief innovation officer, recognized the value of standardizing and migrating existing spatial information into a single repository for consistent interpretation, improved data governance and timely dissemination of information. Technology partners they engaged includes HCL Singapore, National Computer Systems, NIIT Technologies and Satyam Computer Services. By innovating on GIS information infrastructure which serves as a platform for a host of GIS business applications, LTA has significantly improved governance, consistency and speed of business applications development.

Winning Dynamic IT:
- Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
- Workflow Management System
- Document Management System
Ministry of Education
Lim Teck Soon, MOE's Organization Development Division IT director in Singapore, focused on key services that enable Web-based online assessment and a standardized platform to engage students of all schools to explore and assess their career pathways against their interests and attributes.

Winning Dynamic IT:
- First implementation of a computer-assisted career guidance system (CACGS) in ASEAN, that is backed by career development theory in supporting the delivery of education and career guidance in schools.
- Innovation in continuity and aggregation of important self-assessed students information for all stakeholders through primary and secondary education, lending to supporting interactions and career guidance to students.
Reliance Communications Limited
Dr Sumit Chowdhury, CIO of Reliance Communications Limited, enables 60,000 user collaboration by leveraging internal IT service and products to structure and integrate employee needs in terms of information access and collaboration. By tapping on its internal resources, they successfully revamp the static intranet to provide a MyWorld portal with a multitude of productivity services that create immediate business impact from dynamic data exchanges to communication and information curation.

Winning Dynamic IT:
- Personalized platform based on user behaviour and customized configuration
- Mashups and dashboards delivering real-time information across enterprise-wide systems
  CLP Group
Philip Nesci, Head of IT, CLP Hong Kong, underlines CL strong IT governance frameworks as a strategic differentiator. CLP employs strategic steering committee that helps prioritize and to have an oversight on pre and post project reviews and benefits alignment with business. CLP technology partners includes Microsoft, SAP and IBM.

Winning Dynamic IT:
- Industry-leading IT governance
- Dynamic records management processes
- Lean seamless architecture enabling innovation and fast delivery
Sun Life Financial Asia
Mark Ross, VP and CIO at Sun Life Financial Asia in Hong Kong, together with his team thoroughly evaluated the option of differentiating the business on the service side through cloud-based option. The Agile portal with key services and salient customer interfaces allows key leverage of the Web platform to help Sun Life develop further unforeseen capabilities.

Winning Dynamic IT:
- Real-time customer service portal based on Salesforce.com
- Cloud has enabled rapid development of new capabilities like real-time dashboards for project management and business performance