The 2004 Realware(r) Awards

A Celebration of Strategic Business/IT Success

InformationWeek Staff, Contributor

November 23, 2004

9 Min Read
InformationWeek logo in a gray background | InformationWeek

Congratulations to the winners, finalists, and Merit Award winners in the 12th Annual Intelligent Enterprise RealWare Awards! This program recognizes outstanding customer IT applications that meet strategic business objectives and deliver return on investment (ROI).

Thanks to the careful assessment of our judges, this program celebrates what's real: applications and systems that are bringing back benefits to their organizations today. RealWare highlights the essential partnerships between IT solution providers, their customers, and service and system integration providers. Such partnerships are the linchpin of achieving complex, business-critical systems.

The editors of Intelligent Enterprise and its sister publication, Transform, selected this year's judges from among contributing editors and writers and from the ranks of independent industry experts who share our vision of what's working in strategic IT applications. We thank them for the care and effort they put into evaluating the entries, selecting the finalists, and ultimately determining the winners. The competition was tight in most categories, leading to spirited debate and 11th hour decisions.

This year's categories cover five important areas for strategic business applications. Whether finalist, winner, or Merit Award recipient, each of these exceptional applications tell us a great deal about where IT is succeeding in meeting the objectives of business leadership.

We encourage your participation in the 2005 RealWare Awards. Stay tuned to our Web site for more coverage of this year's program and news about next year's.

  1. Best Business Intelligence Application

    Winning Partnership: Cisco Systems and Siebel Systems. Cisco's rapid growth brought with it large amounts of data, many multiple systems — and inconsistent information. The economic downturn of 2000/2001 exposed shortcomings with the company's homegrown reporting system; employees couldn't access meaningful information to make informed decisions. Focusing its BI efforts on data quality, performance, usability, and scalable architecture, the company selected Siebel Analytics for the development of three major BI systems in sales, marketing, and human resources. Top executives now receive real-time, comprehensive sales information through Cisco's "eExec" system; the marketing BI system uses metrics to enable quick measurement of campaign effectiveness; and the HR system offers a single view of disparate information, resulting in a 30 percent gain in employee productivity.

    Finalist: Florida Office of Supreme Courts and Metatomix. More than 750 judges statewide use the Florida's Metatomix-developed Judicial Inquiry System, which links heterogeneous databases to tailored user interfaces, alleviating costly research processes.

    Finalist: St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and Hyperion. Research and treatment of catastrophic illnesses in children require fast and flexible BI solutions. Using Hyperion's suite of tools, St. Jude achieved data consistency, reporting ease of use, and resource savings.

    Merit Award, Information Integration: Office of the Secretary of Defense/Logistics and EWSolutions (with SAIC). Faced with the awesome responsibility of managing an $85 billion supply chain that must respond dynamically to changing war fighter requirements, the DOD worked with EWSolutions and SAIC to develop a distributed, real-time, metadata-integrated system that is indispensable to decision makers.

  2. Best Performance Management Application

    Winning Partnership: Harris Bank and PeopleSoft. To support rapid growth, Harris Bank needed to revamp legacy systems with a new performance management system able to automate manual processes and improve decision-making, financial analysis, as well as profitability and risk management. The company worked with PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management Solutions for the Financial Services Industry to produce a Web-enabled, multidimensional management reporting system that can calculate profitability and results at the customer, instrument, product, and business unit level. The system spans 2,800 departments, 625 products, and 8,000 accounts. Harris has improved revenue through proper product pricing and has gained visibility into revenues, costs, and operations at each branch location.

    Finalist: Ochsner Clinic Foundation and Sybase. Ochsner implemented Sybase products to build the Cardiovascular Information System, which resulted in what it called "the Nordstrom effect": more referrals due to service-level improvements. Decision metrics are applied through algorithms that increase intelligence about medical histories, test results, and current protocols.

    Finalist: Knology and Blue Pumpkin. Knology, a provider of interactive communications and entertainment services, transformed its contact center with Blue Pumpkin Workforce Optimization Suite and related tools, leading to a 19 percent boost in productivity.

    Finalist: Medical Mutual of Ohio and Opus Group. Looking to increase the productivity of nurses performing case reviews and gain a better understanding of cost per case, Medical Mutual employed Opus performance measurement tools. Nurse productivity rose 31 percent and cost per case declined 46 percent.

  3. Best Business Process Management (BPM) Application

    Winning Partnership: American National Insurance (ANICO) and Pegasystems. Determined to make real its philosophy of putting the customer first, ANICO implemented Pegasystems' rules-based BPM technology. ANICO first began working with Pegasystems to better manage its healthcare call center. Using templates, the company has since deployed applications to three more call centers and built a self-service Web system. ANICO brought in $70 million in new business, avoided staff increases, eliminated redundant work processes, and drove outbound campaigns more intelligently through data warehousing and data mining information integration.

    Finalist: Virgin Entertainment Group and Microsoft. To get on top of an inventory shrinkage problem that was partly related to employee theft, Virgin worked with Microsoft's BizTalk Server 2004 to create a reporting solution that features real-time data monitoring, suspicious activity alerts, and long-term trend analysis.

    Finalist: Railinc and Sterling Commerce. Railinc employed Sterling's Gentran Integration Suite to define and extend business processes, increase flexibility, and improve customer service with its trading partners. Railinc used Gentran's process modeling tool to design customized solutions and tap new revenue streams.

    Merit Award, Business Flexibility: California Dept. of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and Fair Isaac. The DMV's Vehicle Registration Application Development Unit worked with Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor to enable the organization to update processes swiftly when rules change or are interpreted differently by the state government.

    Merit Award, Information Visibility: Accredited Home Lenders and BEA Systems. Using BEA's WebLogic solutions, Accredited Home Lenders worked with service provider WellFound to implement a service-oriented architecture to integrate and streamline its core business processes. With more efficient information sharing through a portal, the company improved its transaction rates at reduced cost.

  4. Best Enterprise Content Management Application

    Winning Partnership: Boeing/Alteon and EMC. For Boeing to deliver an aircraft to a customer, related training manuals must be complete and adhere to all relevant Federal Aviation Administration requirements. The reliability of the content management system used to produce training materials is vital. Alteon, Boeing's training arm, developed an innovative solution with EMC's Documentum Enterprise Content Management System. Alteon can now produce training manuals as needed and ship them to training locations around the world, saving money and feeling confident that the material is correct. Manuals 10,000 pages long used to take many days to produce but now take about 20 minutes.

    Finalist: Emerson Process Management and Stellent. Emerson, a global supplier of products, services, and solutions for improving process-related operations, implemented Stellent's Universal Content Management system to store and repurpose a single version of content. Fast implementation of Stellent enabled the company to reduce annual printing and storage costs dramatically.

    Finalist: Harvard Medical School (HMS) and iAnywhere Solutions, a subsidiary of Sybase. Working with third-party integrator Arcstream Solutions, HMS produced MyCourses, a set of iAnywhere mobile applications that keeps students on track with class schedules, hospital case log notes, animated anatomy illustrations, and more. HMS has saved more than $800,000 to date.

    Merit Awards, Records Management: Judges awarded two winners. The MONY Group/AXA Financial developed its AXS-One Compliance Platform using a Web services architecture to provide access to and integration of data archives. SEB Group and ZANTAZ, with Essential Computing achieved goals of lowering costs associated with storing data in Microsoft Exchange, reducing migration time to a new version, and easing the email management burden on 12,000 users.

  5. Best Intelligent Customer Relationship Management Application

    Winning Partnership: Avid Technology and SAP AG. A preeminent technology provider for digital video, audio, and 3D production systems for all media channels, Avid needed to move from disparate systems to a more integrated information infrastructure. Customer service agents couldn't see which contracts or products customers had. Building on implementations of SAP R/3, Business Information Warehouse, and mySAP CRM, Avid gained a centralized information hub that enabled its sales team to "work smarter, not harder." Time-consuming manual processes have been replaced by quicker access to customer information and metrics that help the marketing team qualify leads. Avid has turned its customer support center into a revenue-generating department.

    Finalist: Sovereign Bank and Salesnet. Experiencing growth pains after expanding from retail and thrift banking to commercial lending, Sovereign needed an incremental approach to reach its ultimate CRM goal. Salesnet's service provider model has allowed the company to fix broken processes while maintaining focus on building better customer relationships.

    Finalist: Cheerstix and FrontRange Solutions. Keeping track of multiple contacts at the same organization is essential for Cheerstix, maker of balloon noisemakers that when slammed together, result in the metallic, clanging sounds made famous by Anaheim Angels fans in the 2002 World Series. Cheerstix calls GoldMine the "heartbeat of the entire organization."

    Finalist: Mercur Assistance AG Holding and Autonomy. Mercur, which provides 24-hour emergency help and advice, turned to Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer. Accessed through a portal, the Layer gives agents immediate and simultaneous access to more than 150 information sources. Autonomy uses dynamic hyperlinks to related content, easing agents' struggles with other search techniques.

    Finalist and Merit Award Winner, Marketing Management: Fubon Financial Holding Co., Ltd. and Teradata, a division of NCR. Fubon developed a Teradata CRM application to gain an integrated view of customers and an understanding of business opportunities. Fubon reports three to five times more profitable leads, telemarketing conversation rates up 20 percent, and total assets under management up 30 percent within one year.

    Merit Award Winner, Customer Data Integration: Sutter Health and Initiate Systems. With a growing customer base of approximately 10 million individuals, Sutter Health chose to deploy an Enterprise Master Person Index (EMPI), a software system that identifies persons in an integrated healthcare delivery system. Working with Initiate Systems’ Identity Hub, Sutter Health enabled its network of doctors and hospitals to have a single view of its patients, no matter where they may go in the network for treatment.

The 2004 RealWare Awards Judges

RealWare Awards Sponsored by: Intelligent Enterprise
Recognizing IT Excellence since 1993

Never Miss a Beat: Get a snapshot of the issues affecting the IT industry straight to your inbox.

You May Also Like


More Insights