Technology Managers Forum Best Practices Past Winners

BEST PRACTICE AWARDS: 2004 WINNERS
Oct. 14th, 2004: Technology Managers Forum is pleased to announce the winners of the 2004 Best Practice Awards. Winners were announced at our Technology Managers Forum tenth annual fall conference, Enterprise Forum 2004. Categories were judged by IT managers from large enterprises (click here for a list of judges). Following are the winners and honorable mentions in each of seven categories, along with summaries of their projects.
2003 WINNERS
Category	Organization	Best Practice Summary
First Place: TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION	UPS	UPS exemplified excellence in all the demanding criteria for the Technology Innovation award. UPS designed, developed, and deployed technology to automate loading, routing, quality control, and service assurance for truck-based delivery. In doing so, they tied together advanced algorithms, massive databases, mobile computing, GPS positioning, legacy systems integration, patented technology, and extremely low latency system performance with process improvements based largely on automation. This truck based delivery system and the related process and operational improvements were rolled out globally to over 100,000 employees. To accomplish this, UPS developed a multidisciplinary approach involving business leaders, IT, industrial engineering, operations logistics, and related personnel/competencies. In addition to delivering explicitly quantifiable business results and environmental benefits, the application has enhanced UPS' competitive advantage. Supporting a leading edge process with technology vision, the UPS team also exhibited excellence in technology project management, conducting workshops and acquiring senior leadership buy-in supported by rigorous business cases. A pilot implementation yielded user feedback that helped fine-tune the solution and ensured a more successful user buy-in downstream. UPS demonstrated how advanced technology, appropriately human-engineered, can be repeatedly rolled out on massive global scale. They achieved quantifiable business results, productivity gains and enhanced their customer value proposition. Most importantly, the UPS truck delivery system improves a mission critical application and contributes directly to their competitive advantage.
Honorable Mention: TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION	Deutsche Bank, Execution Services	Deutsche Bank reengineered the core IT architecture for its equity trading platform to achieve solid competitive and business results. Through an innovative use of tools, they leveraged financial data generated by the equity trading system to improve market share, increase wallet share, reduce costs, and create new businesses. By overhauling the trading platform architecture, they realized unprecedented performance and scalability for the system, reduced latency, increased throughput, and dramatically enhanced its recoverability from server, storage, and network failures. Furthermore, they added value to the equity trading system because the new tools support data visualization, data mining, and other functions related to large scale statistical analysis. Finally, this solid platform has enabled a much higher degree of straight-through processing and end-to-end automation. To accomplish all this, an innovative project structure was created called "smart sourcing" development-- an in-house mix of Western and Russian developer resources. Agile development techniques were used in a controlled pilot environment to rapidly iterate through design changes that were in-line with user feedback. Congratulations to Deutsche Bank's for its innovative improvements to its equity trading system that led to a four-fold increase in trading volume resulting in a 2 to 3 times increase in market share, as well as enabling dozens of major new client acquisitions.
First Place: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY COMPLIANCE	Prudential Financial	Prudential Financial’s approach is best- of -breed and highly deserving of this year's Best Practice Award in the new category of IT Compliance. Effective IT compliance programs frequently rely upon departmental self-assessments, utilizing standard templates. Prudential Financial's Technology Risk Management team created the "Self Assessment Front End" (SAFE) application to ensure consistent self assessments across the Prudential Financial enterprise. SAFE is a central repository of self assessment templates, covering such subject areas as Sarbanes-Oxley, privacy, business process re-engineering and corporate/business as usual initiatives. The application supports an enterprise-wide process that ensures consistency in terms of approach, scope, and commonality in language; it also enforces an approval process that explicitly assigns responsibility to the appropriate managerial levels. The development of SAFE avoided time delays, costs, and duplication of efforts that would have occurred by reliance on individual, spreadsheet based processes of self assessment. The SAFE process enabled Prudential Financial to effectively meet Sarbanes-Oxley requirements within the timeframes dictated by the legislation. Indeed, third parties have already purchased SAFE to get a head start on developing their own standard risk and control libraries. Congratulations to the Prudential team for this innovative and cost-effective compliance solution. .
First Place: BUSINESS CONTINUITY	Calpine Corporation and Iron Mountain	The winner of the 2004 Best Practices Award for Business Continuity goes to Calpine Corporation and Iron Mountain. Calpine, along with Iron Mountain, which provides Calpine with electronic vaulting services, was able to achieve triple digit ROI over three and five year calculations and met the challenges of business continuity/disaster recovery using best practice processes across all aspects of the project. From thorough risk analysis to formal change management processes and comprehensive testing, Calpine has built a sound BCDR plan and met the ever-demanding regulatory requirements of today’s corporate landscape. Implementing best practices around backup and recovery, Calpine was able to ensure business continuity at remote sites. Data is now backed-up continuously, monitored 24 x 7, and stored offsite. Additionally, focus on retention addresses compliance challenges. The use of disk storage enables quick recovery times and an up-to-the-minute recovery point. Calpine’s commitment to its more than 90 energy centers has resulted in substantial cost savings, a unique competitive advantage, and increased business value. Congratulations to the teams at Calpine Corporation and Iron Mountain for the successful implementation of a detailed business continuity strategy that enables the company to mitigate the risks associated with man-made and natural disasters.
First Place: BUSINESS PROCESS IMPROVEMENT	Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey & Dakota Imaging, Inc., a WebMD company	The classic Business Process Improvement award winner meets and exceeds the “better, faster, cheaper” challenge. Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey is a role model in their re-engineering efforts for their claims process. Millions of people submit medical claims every year. Horizon BCBS, with their vendor partner, Dakota Imaging, Inc., a WebMD company, developed an improved process for handling these claims which resulted in lower costs, greater capacity and higher satisfaction ratings from both the internal users and customers. Specifically, Horizon BCBS developed an impressive methodology for tool selection and business process improvement: their process change significantly reduced headcount, cost per claim, and operating costs, which resulted in a huge overall savings running into the millions of dollars. Additionally, the technology and process changes were well communicated to all levels of the organization throughout the project, and any resistance to change was addressed through open forums, training and increased visibility and support of senior management--in fact changes suggested by users were frequently implemented. Finally, the process resulted in increased customer satisfaction due to improved data accuracy and a 25% faster turn-around time. Congratulations to Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey and Dakota Imaging, Inc. for their achievement in this extremely competitive category. .
Honorable Mention: BUSINESS PROCESS IMPROVEMENT	New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation and Business Logic, Inc.	New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) executed an excellent project with the help of Business Logic, Inc., a New York City-based software and technology consulting firm. The solution is an interactive internet and intranet application that addresses critical business requirements of New York state regulations (Bell 405) that monitor residents’ working conditions--in HHC’s case, 2,200 residents in 180 residency programs at 11 hospitals. With 4500 users, the solution allows HHC to monitor its resident programs, individual residents, individual hospitals, and whole networks for compliance. They can also compare resident surveys with the regulation parameters and track the implementation of new national standards. HHC’s web-based reporting system replaced a manual process that was cumbersome and difficult to validate. Establishing a web-based site enabled member hospitals to expand the number of residents monitored, ensure greater accuracy, and reduce substantially the manpower needed to track residents, thereby allowing staff to be re-deployed to more critical functions. Congratulations to both New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation and Business Logic, Inc for their successful implementation of a web-based, intranet-internet solution that provides the largest municipal health care system in the country with a distinct advantage in meeting their compliance obligations.
First Place: OUTSOURCING MANAGEMENT	Deutsche Bank	The Deutsche Bank Securities Processing Evaluation and Architectural Re-Engineering (eSPEAR) project is an enterprise-class outsourcing undertaking. Among its many merits, eSPEAR demonstrated an excellent balance of in-house and outsource resource that cut across a range of countries and involved more than 500 employees. Deutsche Bank demonstrated proper methodology in its vendor selection, coordination and managerial oversight, as well as in its financial management. Insightful metrics were used and missteps were revisited to adapt and improve mid-project. Appropriate measures were taken in security management and knowledge retention. The approach to fabricate a business analysis composed of both vendor and in-house employees was an excellent practice and was a factor in the project’s success. The judges’ were most impressed by the success with which Deutsche Bank engaged their vendor as a partner. The breadth and complexity of the project was managed with industry best practices which lead to deployment and production efficiencies. Deutsche Bank demonstrated leading edge best practices in outsourcing through eSPEAR, and justifiably earned the Technology Manager's Forum Best Practice Award for Outsourcing Management for 2004.