By David Bicknell
Zizzi Restaurant picked up the IT project of the year accolade in The Corporate IT Forum’s 8th Real IT Awards held last night.
Zizzi’s ‘Pennies with Zizzi’ project involved working with The Pennies Foundation to create an electronic charity box that allows customers paying by card to donate spare change to charity. The corporate, social and environmental responsbility project is already on track to deliver £100,000 of micro donations to The Prince’s Trust.
According to the judges, drawn from leading UK and international user organisations such as South West Water, DHL, GlaxoSmithKline and Laing O’Rourke, “Zizzi showed its determination to create a way of supporting casual donations in the new age of electronic payment; they paid close attention to communications to make sure all stakeholders – particularly customers – would embrace it. We were very impressed by the way this was driven by the IT department.”
The Real IT award winners covered a broad spectrum of corporate IT users including public and private sector organisations such as HM Revenue and Customs, Balfour Beatty, The Environment Agency and British Sugar, as well as high street retailers New Look and Pizza Express.
The winning entries across 13 categories ranged from the world’s first ever iPhone app for payment by smartphone, to a targeted flood warning service for emergency flood responders and a rapid deployment of IT project in the new Tripoli.
The awards featured new categories to recognise the breadth of innovation being provided by and the growing importance of corporate IT within business. The additions included Innovation in Business, Innovation in Mobile, Security as an Enabler and Social Media.
A new skills-related category, Developing Talent in Business, was also introduced, reflecting The Corporate IT Forum’s desire to tackle the education, training and skills challenge. In this new category HM Revenue and Customs was recognised for its ‘Capability Development Programme’, a programme of investment in employees designed to establish them as experts in their chosen field, with external accreditation of their professional skills.
Chairman of The Corporate IT Forum John Harris said, “What is particularly striking this year is that the innovation we are seeing is in areas where IT is giving something back, rather than where it is solely focused on delivering cost savings and doing more with less. This year IT is all about listening to user and customer needs – within the business and externally – and coming up with innovative ways to make things faster, easier and more efficient for them.”
Throughout the coming months the winners and runners-up will present their projects through Forum workshops that are open to all user organisations. By collating learning and sharing their experiences, the Corporate IT Forum suggests, corporate IT departments will become more proactive and successful in delivering business advantage for their organisations.
The Winners of the Real IT Awards:
Overall winner – Project of the year 2012
Winner: Zizzi Restaurant – Pennies with Zizzi
Runner-up: GlaxoSmithKline – Diseases of the Developing World
Corporate, Social and Environmental Responsibility
Winner: Zizzi Restaurant – Pennies with Zizzi
Delivering Business Value and E-Commerce
Winner: Land Registry – Register Extract Service
Developing Talent in Business
Winner: HM Revenue and Customs – Capability Development Programme
Innovation in Business
Winner: Environment Agency – Targeted Flood Warnings
Innovation in Mobile
Winner: Pizza Express – Pizza Express App
Innovation in Technology
Winner: Environment Agency – Targeted Flood Warnings
Partnership
Winners: GlaxoSmithKline – Diseases of the Developing World
And: The Co-operative Banking Group – The Big Card Programme
Rapid Response
Winner: Foreign & Commonwealth Office – Tripoli – Rapid Deployment of IT
Security as an Enabler
Winner: GlaxoSmithKline – Secure Enhance
Service Improvement
Winner: Balfour Beatty – Platform for Growth
Social Media
Winner: New Look – NL Daily
Working Smarter
Winner: British Sugar – Load Slots – Optiflex
A full list of winners and runners up is on the Corporate IT Forum website
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