IT managers and staff from Marks & Spencer, the bank
clearing house Bacs, Cheshire County Council and East Midlands
Electricity won accolades from their peers for successful IT
projects at The Corporate IT Forum's (Tif) annual awards
recently.
The projects were judged best from the user group's 140-strong
corporate member base by a team of IT user-manager judges for their
tangible business value, innovation and for being delivered on time
and to budget.
"These awards are prized because IT practitioners judge projects by
their own standards, which carries so much more weight," said Tif
chairman and Rolls-Royce director of business improvement, Jonathan
Mitchell.
Tif thrives despite IT's poor showing >>
www.tif.co.uk
Project innovation award
Winner Bacs
Bank clearing house Bacs won the project innovation category
with its completion, on time and to budget, of the first stage of
moving the central banking clearing system to an internet
protocol-based model built to handle five billion transactions a
year.
The project, which involved 13 banks, 40,000 business customers,
250,000 other customers, and handling peak loads of 100 million
transactions a day, took 20,000 man days to complete.
Bacs overcame risks from lack of common standards for smartcard
digital-based signatures, and everything about the project was new:
hardware (Sun Microsystems); software (Oracle DBase); development
tools (Java 2 Enterprise Edition, web management system); and
security model.
Highly commended East Midlands
Electricity
The power utility's engineers can respond effectively if a
whirlwind brings down power cables, thanks to its new compact
read-only Java-based graphics system (Crog). It enables engineers
to carry diagrams of installations on portable computers, using a
bespoke file format and directory structure for geographical
information that stores compressed spatial data.
Business profitability award
Winner Marks & Spencer
High-street retailer Marks & Spencer won the business
profitability category with its web-based Collaborator
system.
This integrates supplier processes, system planning,
forecasting, and replenishment and has already achieved a 4%
increase in sales, four weeks reduction in stockholding, and a 40%
decrease in value of holdings of reduced price stock.
The judges were impressed by "really sound project governance,
It was as much a business process change for their departments and
suppliers as an IT change," they said.
Collaborator replaces existing systems with a web-based
application, giving scalability, performance and
functionality.
"Many web-based applications just add a new web front end," said
one judge, "but this was much more than that."
Highly commended Cheshire County Council's
integrated business system
The council's Oracle 11i-based integrated business system has
already saved Cheshire £3m a year.
Aided by consultancy KPMG, the enterprise resource planning
project took 60 employees 18 months to migrate general ledger,
inventory management, fixed assets, accounts receivable and
payable, human resources and payroll from a legacy system.