Effective and profitable re-use of systems, code and facilities was
a strong theme among the winners of The Infrastructure Forum's
(Tif) Excellence in Business 2002 Awards last week.
IT managers at British Airports Authority (BAA), advertising agency
Grey Worldwide, Nationwide Building Society and Bupa, all earned
accolades from their peers.
- Overall winner was BAA's nine-month Heathrow-based project to
consolidate its UK-wide computing. The project, which reduced 16
computer rooms to two, was completed eight days early and more than
£100,000 under budget, bringing savings of over £1m a year, plus a
28% improvement in systems performance.
Mark Ryan, infrastructure projects programme manager at BAA, said,
"We are proud of the achievement in synchronising a demanding IT
consolidation programme with the tight building construction
project timetable. The Heathrow Datacentre was a challenging
programme involving major construction work, IT systems insourcing
and the development of IT infrastructure."
- Grey Worldwide's intranet for Europe, the Middle East and
Africa, drawn together using the company's library of reusable
code, won the Tif award for innovation.
"The most positive part was having a really good working
relationship with the business team. The award is as much for the
business team as for the IT team," said chief information officer,
Anne Marie Wolfe.
"The technology challenge was videostreaming TV ads to offices in
places like Kenya and Slovenia," she said. "We wanted them to see
award-winning work across the network, so we needed low, medium and
high bandwidth viewing streams. My biggest challenge was to make
the content exciting, to balance features with quality and
comfort," she added.
- Bupa's installation of a platform to grow its telesales system
was highly commended for profitability. The system paid for itself
quickly by increasing business by 5% with 5% fewer staff, while
retention rose by 1%.
- Also commended was the Nationwide Building Society's
multi-device customer access, which involved heavy use of reusable
objects to future-proof the system enabling Nationwide to launch
Europe's first pocket PC banking service.