Steal This Idea: And the Winner Is ...

Computerworld - Kathy Fong knows numbers. As a certified public accountant, it's her job. But technology? She's no rookie, but no expert, either. So when she received Southern California Edison's (SCE) first-ever CIO Excellence in IT Award, she was simultaneously flattered and taken aback.
It was no mistake. Fong was one of 10 employees - including three from outside IT -- to receive the new annual award in March from Mahvash Yazdi, CIO at the Rosemead, Calif.-based energy utility. "What's unique about our program is we decided to take it to a new level and recognize and award our internal clients," says Yazdi.
Honoring business unit employees with IT awards may seem counterintuitive, but Yazdi says it helps promote the value of IT/business partnerships companywide.
Such awards aren't something that Sue Goldberg has seen. But the president of Northeast Training Group Inc., an IT training consulting company in Chestnut Hill, Mass., says they're a great way to promote collaboration by shining a light on those who live it.
"It's almost like an Academy Award," Fong says. "It's probably the closest I'll ever get to that."
How It Works
The names of the award categories -- Commit and Deliver, Operational Excellence and Innovation, and Technical Literacy -- reflect the core strategies and principles of SCE's IT department. Yazdi's team wanted to choose role models who demonstrate day-to-day actions in line with those principles.
Fong has spent the past year and a half leading a cross-functional project team that's integrating systems across various business units so that meter readings, billing and ledgers, for instance, are tied together into a whole system rather than operated as independent silos.
John Ballance, director of transmission and distribution engineering, won the Innovation award for teaming with IT to implement an Internet-based training system that veteran engineers can use to conduct lectures for junior engineers scattered around the state.
It was wonderful to be honored by the IT department, Ballance says, but recognizing IT employees is just as critical. "A large part of the company interacts with those people," he says. "So you start putting faces to names of people who are doing extraordinary jobs."
Paul Killins, winner of the Commit and Deliver award, is one of those IT people, says Yazdi. When SCE learned it had to take over energy procurement from the state by Jan. 1, Killins, SCE's IT energy procurement manager, led a team to get a combined procurement and risk management system in fast. The system and the business processes supporting it had to be