CIO Canada congratulates The City of London Police Service in Ontario as the top winner of the ITX Award for 2000. London Police Service won for its “Mobile Policeman” initiative, a four-phase technology renewal project that has successfully streamlined the flow of information within the police force and between it and other partners in the justice system.
This initiative affected virtually everyone in the organization, since London Police Service completely overhauled how it captured and processed information and how it delivered services. The end-to-end flow of information from an investigating officer, to a criminal investigation officer, to the courts and Crown, has become one continuum, as opposed to unrelated segments of a process. The entire system – which consists of the computer-aided dispatch system, records management system, voice/data radio communications system and mobile workstations in patrol vehicles – is integrated and no effort is wasted due to duplicated effort.
The successful completion of this project has enabled London Police Service to reduce the number of people involved in the processing of information, while providing an increased number of services and investigative tools to police officers.
Honourable mention awards were also bestowed on Air Canada, Canada Life Assurance and TST Expedited Services (a division of Transforce).
Air Canada was recognized for its “Express Check-in” self-service airport kiosks. Some of the goals for Express Check-in were to increase market share through improved customer service, reduce passenger check-in time, and reduce the net labour unit cost per passenger boarded.
Since Express Check-in’s introduction in August 1999, there has been a very rapid rate of customer adoption, with 31 per cent of Toronto airport passengers regularly using the service. Passengers have seen an 80-per-cent reduction in overall check-in time for peak periods. For Air Canada, cost reductions due to productivity gains will eventually be $14.4 million annually. The airline company also sees reductions in operating costs of $3.7 million annually achieved from synergy between Express Check-in and Air Canada’s electronic ticket service.
Canada Life’s award-winning “Rewards System” has helped to reestablish the company as a strong competitor in the Small Case Life and Health Insurance market, after experiencing negative growth in this area for the three years prior to the launch of the Rewards Systems.
Moving away from a legacy mainframe to a client/server application allowed Canada Life to significantly increase the range of plan options it could offer. It also allowed instant updates to the rating methodology to meet market expectations – a key factor in this very rate-sensitive segment of the insurance business. Using the Rewards System, Canada Life has reduced turnaround time on new quotes from 24 hours to 20 minutes – 90 per cent of the time.
TST Expedited Services received its honourable mention award for its TS Tracs initiative. The transport company’s solution was two-fold. First, TST Expedited Services created TS Tracs Emergency Freight Management System as an Internet-enabling tool. The system integrates satellite messaging, global positioning, geographical mapping, mileage-based software, telecommunications, imaging, EDI, customized reports and central faxing.
Second, the company ported these services to the Internet as a customer-enabling tool called Web Tracs, allowing customers to use the Internet to: create an order; track an active shipment; offer the TST Internet tracking services to their own customers; dynamically demand position updates of trucks; trace historical loads; view scanned images of all related trip documents; and generate dynamic reports of all historical emergency shipments.
CIO Canada congratulates the ITX Award winners for 2000 and wishes to thank all 36 organizations who submitted entries. A more in-depth look at the winning entries will appear in CIO Canada later this fall.
