September 27, 1999

InformationWeek500
Innovators Seem To Try Harder

wise "Chairman of the Board" once crooned: "If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere." That's the spirit of the InformationWeek 500, the nation's largest and most innovative IT users. We applaud these companies not only for their successful IT strategies but also for seizing the opportunity to benchmark themselves against their industry peers and the upper echelon of the IT community.

A key thing about the InformationWeek 500, in its 11th year, is that rankings aren't determined by how much technology these companies purchase. They're based on what companies do with that technology. The criteria used in the selection process is determined by InformationWeek editors. We seek to reward companies that demonstrate technological, procedural, and organizational innovation. Only companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue may participate.

The research involves identifying and ranking the 500 companies after an extensive mail, phone, and fax study. Next, we survey senior IT executives at these companies on their priorities and spending plans in the year ahead.

InformationWeek 500 companies were awarded gold, silver, and bronze citations for their early adoption and creative use of technologies that can help create significant business value for their companies. This year the categories include application development, E-business, customer-relationship management, and business process/enterprise resource planning. Citations are awarded on a curve, with the highest third in each category receiving gold medals.

On behalf of InformationWeek and our readers, we congratulate this year's InformationWeek 500. Without their cooperation, it wouldn't be possible to generate in-depth reporting and research on innovative IT use.

We also thank the top-notch research partners that helped with this project. IRG Corp. of Sterling Heights, Mich., supplied the list of contacts at U.S. companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue, then fielded IT executive qualifying interviews. This year, IRG also supplied financial information about the companies. San Diego's CIC Research Inc. supplied additional data analysis of the qualifying study. Survey.com, formerly World Research Inc.) of San Jose, Calif., fielded a second survey of 250 InformationWeek 500 executives in June.

Information Builders Inc. of New York, using its WebFocus product, updated a Web application on www.informationweek.com/500advisor to let your company compare itself to the InformationWeek 500.

The entire InformationWeek 500 research report is available in PDF format at www.informationweek.com/reports. Individual industry reports are also available.

Please let us know how can we make the InformationWeek 500 more useful

Rusty Weston,
Senior Managing Editor,
InformationWeek Research
rweston@cmp.com

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