Public Sector Storms Tech Success Awards

The public sector has won the lion’s share of TechWeekEurope‘s Tech Success awards for 2013, which recognise innovation and excellence in end-user IT projects.  Westminster City Council, South Worcestershire Shared ICT Services, and an NHS Big Data project all won accolades.

Now in its second year, Tech Success celebrates successful IT projects across seven major categories: best cloud project, best mobility project, best big data project, best public sector project, best security project, best open source project, and an overall award for the most innovative project to have entered the contest. Public sector projects won in three categories alongside the specific Public Sector award.

Fierce competition

The categories were fiercely contested again this year, and an expert panel of judges spent weeks deciding which projects best showed the values of responsive and creative tech work.

Last week, TechWeekEurope issued a short list of winning projects, and today announced the final winners in a webcast, which is recorded and can be watched at any time.

The winning projects are as follows:

• Innovation: Westminster City Council used sensors to gather real-time information from parking bays and linked this to customer-facing applications and mobile devices used by staff. This Internet of Things application addresses an issue many people find frustrating.

• Open source: South Worcestershire ICT Shared Services integrated several open source technologies to deliver a flexible generic interface to council services which is already in use at three councils.

• Cloud: Cancer Research UK, with fireHost, built a payment processing system to handle more than £8 million during a charity telethon and can re-use it for future events.

• Big Data: NHS Health and Social Care Information Centre, working with BJSS, re-wrote the Hospital Episode Record system to gain real insight  into more than 1.5 billion patient records going back to 1989.

• Security: Despite criticism of banks’ reticence around security, Royal Bank of Scotland provided information about a proactive system that gets end users involved in preventing data loss, developed with Websense.

• Mobility: SitexOrbis used lLiquid Voice to provide a system that uses call recording and silent alarms to protect lone workers visiting properties that it manages.

• Public Sector: An app developed by Blackburn IT Services to report graffiti and fly tipping is now widely in use for other issues across the country.

The Tech Success judging panel includes our editor Peter Judge, along with Lorenzo Cavallaro, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of information security at Royal Holloway, University of London; Ian Osborne, Project Director at techUK;, Clive Longbottom, Co-Founder at Quocirca; Liam Newcombe, Technical Director at Romonet; Mark Taylor, CEO at Sirius; Vince Holton, Owner of Incisor TV; and Mark Young, Editor at Nimbus Ninety.

Last year, the first Tech Success awards honoured IT staff in the UK who created innovative projects that benefited their organisations. Winners included Jaguar Land Rover, Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust (CHUFT), and Cadoxton primary school in Wales. All of them used technology in new ways that showed how IT can help any organisation perform better.

We look forward to more entries next year for Tech Success, and congratulate all the winners of this year’s awards!

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