Let’s Celebrate Tech Success!

On TechWeekEurope, we encounter many successful  IT projects. Despite the economic crisis – or maybe because of it – CIOs and IT managers are doing some of their best work ever.

IT projects are opening up new markets, and helping organisations to address old ones better, using new tools such as cloud computing, big data, and mobile devices.

And yet, this work rarely gets the recognition it deserves. Successful tech projects may change lives, but they rarely get coverage.

That is partly because we are journalists. We want news. So we cover the issues that will affect you – new products from vendors, new regulations from governments, and new threats from the hacking industry.

Within that there is a big Catch-22 around successful projects. We love to talk to real CIOs and IT managers. But iIronically and unfairly, what you say is almost never news.

Making tech projects into news

When vendor A announces a deal with a customer B it might be news.  It’s often worth noting that Customer B trusts Vendor A’s implementation of Big Data (or whatever it is) and is prepared to hand over bucketloads of cash for it. But it isn’t a working project. At this stage, the project doesn’t exist, because it hasn’t  been built yet.

Six or nine months later, the project is completed, and maybe a thousand users come into work to find their business life is transformed. But that isn’t news any more. It’s hard to cover it, because it’s a project we all heard about when it was a contract. If the contract is delivered on time, it’s not news. (If it fails of course, that is news, but that’s another story.)

How do we fix this? It seemed to us we should do something that will make successful tech into news. And the answer involves a set of awards which we hope will be different from those you might see elsewhere.

Our Tech Success Awards are intended to celebrate successful projects in British organisations.

We have some very simple, but very definite criteria for the winners we are looking for.

• It must be real Firstly, this is a project which has been delivered, and is providing real benefits. Projects can have multiple go-live dates, but we want one where a major chunk of functionality was delivered in the UK, sometime between last August, and our closing date of September 16 2012.
• It must be innovative We ant to hear from people who did something new. You may not have been the first to use the particular technology you chose, but you may have brought it into the UK, or applied it differently, or rolled it out to a bigger scale than anyone else. Or delivered it in half the time.
• It must have benefits We aren’t demanding you save the company millions. That;’s the CFO’s job. Your project might save the company money, or it might win shedloads of  new business, or allow your firm to adapt to changing business conditions. Whatever, the benefits, we want to see projects that really engages with your organisation’s needs.
• You must tell the story   We don’t want to hear this from the vendors. We want to hear from the CIOs and IT staff that came up with the idea, scoped it and implemented it. You tell us why this project was so great, with a 500 word I(or less) description of the project, and we will listen.

You have till October 19 to tell us about your projects, and then we’ll deliberate. The winning projects will be the ones that – in the view of our panel of judges – best meet those criteria, within the following set of categories, which we chose to bring out the main hot spots within today’s IT environment.

To be eligible your project should be live, should have been delivered in the UK since May 2011, and should fit one or more of the following categories:

• Cloud
• Big Data
• Mobile/BYOD
• Green/Efficient
• Open Source
• Public Sector

you can enter for multiple Awards, and all the projects will be considered for our overall prize for the most innovative project.

We know the kind of IT projects that are out there. and we look forwad to being stunned by your creative and business-savvy creations.

UPDATE: We’ve made it easier to enter. Fill in a form here!

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