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March 15, 2004 (Computerworld) --
With so many choices available to us in our everyday lives, it's the simple solution that often goes unexplored. Not so with this year's Best in Class award winners, who took some roads less traveled. They stopped, stepped back, took in the entire breadth of their IT environments and then recast their existing systems. Their choices not only created more nimble IT organizations, but also addressed business imperatives in creative, efficient ways.
Take John M. Gilligan, whose makeover of the U.S. Air Force's IT systems included consolidating infrastructure, centralizing management and standardizing applications. The result: annual savings of about $200 million. Or Steve J. Bandrowczak, whose project at DHL International to consolidate eight data centers into one state-of-the-art facility is saving the freight company about $24 million a year.
Now in its third year, Computerworld's Premier 100 Best in Class awards honor such leaders. They are a select subset of the 2004 Premier 100 honorees who have created striking business value through cutting-edge technology projects. To choose this year's 12 winners, a panel of outside judges and Computerworld editors reviewed the project candidates, looking in particular for signs of measurable payback, learning experiences, strategic importance to the business, substantive customer impact and new revenue opportunities or cost savings.
Many of these IT leaders applied the basic idea of simplification to some big projects. But with grandness of scale, of course, comes friction and risk. We hope that reading about how these 12 award-winners overcame those challenges will put you on your own path to simplifying and enhancing your IT environment.
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