What makes an excellent application of IT? Certainly it is much more than simply delivering a system on time and on budget. The Information Technology Excellence (ITX) Awards recognize the achievements of individuals who have used their imagination, vision, hard work, and management skills to implement IT applications that have proven to be of exceptional value to their organizations.
A collaborative venture between CIO Canada publisher LTI, the Conference Board of Canada, and the Globe and Mail, the ITX Awards are presented each fall at a gala banquet in Toronto, where the winners are feted by an enthusiastic gathering of their peers. This year’s winners are exemplars of how IT can competitively transform the organization and prepare it for success in the new millennium.
The City of Edmonton, which took top honours, along with runners up Bell Emergis and mbanx, all created highly flexible, customizable systems. The City of Edmonton’s POSSE system gives users exceptional flexibility in workflow management. Bell Emergis’ Travelix-DMS is an Internet-based travel information system which can be set up and operated by many different countries with limited maintenance. And mbanx used IT to create an extremely personal banking relationship with its customers.
The panel of judges for the 1998 ITX Awards came from the business and IS communities of seven organizations in a variety of industry sectors. After a rigorous scoring and review process, the judges selected six finalists from the 26 applications received. All the finalists were visited by a team of judges before a winner was selected. Four judging criteria were used:
Business advantage – what value does the application deliver to the organization?
IT pervasiveness – could this application have been done without IT?
Collaboration – how closely did users and Information Services (IS) work together?
Enterprise extension – how did this application change the organization’s way of doing business?
