20 Great Ideas To Steal In 2014
We've singled out 20 InformationWeek Elite 100 winners whose IT projects have transformed their businesses. Use them to inspire creativity and advance your plans.
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This is InformationWeek's 26th year ranking US companies that use technology in innovative ways. This time the recognition is even more special because we've narrowed the number of honorees from 500 to 100; we now call our ranking the InformationWeek Elite 100. The creativity represented by this year's 100 organizations has not narrowed, though. An overriding theme in their accomplishments: innovative use of big data. Out of this elite 100 we've chosen 20 of the best ideas to present in this slideshow.
Our list shows companies putting data analytics into action across a wide variety of industries. If these companies are any indication, in 2014 and in the years that follow business decisions will be more data-driven, data will be more visual and more mobile, more medical data will be made accessible to help save lives, and more equipment and other "things" will be wirelessly connected to the Internet.
In the aviation sector, Boeing's IT and engineering teams collaborated to roll out data visualization tools that let production employees find and view aircraft parts via interactive 3D images. In healthcare, Atlantic Health System built a warning system that presents patients' lab and vitals data to doctors for early signs of sepsis and gives alerts if the patient is at risk.
Like Boeing, Spirit AeroSystems is using data analytics to improve aircraft production. The company tapped SAP's HANA in-memory database and BusinessObjects analytics tools to scour airplane construction data to find the source of manufacturing delays.
John Deere is taking wireless data collection to a new level in its John Deere tractors and combines. The company has added Internet- and GPS-connected sensors and display screens that feed into the MyJohnDeere.com website, where farm managers can quickly access important field data.
As in previous years, companies are pushing the boundaries of mobile app development. Yet it's more apparent this year that IT teams must integrate data analytics with a mobile strategy to make it truly effective.
Construction and design company Skanska, for instance, created its own iOS app to help construction experts and hospital clients estimate building costs for a new medical facility. What sets the app apart is its ability to analyze energy usage, square foot efficiency, and ROI data.
Similarly, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) developed Convergence, a Windows 8 tablet app that pulls data from multiple electronic health record systems and presents a unified view to clinicians. Insurance Auto Auctions (IAA) created a mobile app that simulcasts car auctions, allowing users to search car information and photos, view multiple auctions at once, and get alerts if they win or are outbid.
Wearable technologies in the workplace are still in the fledgling phase, but Boston hospital Beth Israel Deaconess might signal the shape of things to come by testing Google Glass in various physician and nursing scenarios. Ultimately, Beth Israel's Google Glass experiment shares the same goal as the other companies on this list: to provide fast access to the most important data, in a form and place that employees can put it directly to use.
These 20 great ideas are working. Make one work for you.
Imagine this scenario: A doctor tends to an emergency room patient, but instead of logging onto a computer or iPad for information about the patient's circumstances, she taps her Google Glass. Up pops triage details, nursing documentation, vital signs, and lab and radiology results to help the doctor with an assessment.
It's still in testing, but that's what Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is working toward in its ongoing experiment with Google Glass. "Emergency physicians work in a high-stress, fast-paced environment and must be able to quickly access information, filtering relevant information and making decisions based on evidence," the company said.
The building of a Boeing aircraft generates 9 TB of data per plane -- data that once could be accessed only by database specialists. Boeing's engineering, IT, and manufacturing teams recently joined forces to add locator functions and a user-friendly interface to its internally developed Integration Visualization Tool (IVT), making it easier for aircraft production employees to view the status of in-work aircraft parts via interactive 3D images.
During the design and testing of 787 Dreamliner wheel wells, for instance, Boeing teams used the IVT locator function to simulate an aircraft landing and make sure wheel well parts met engineering specifications. Quality inspectors use an IVT-loaded laptop to identify any problematic parts and start a report with one click. Using the IVT locator function, factory teams lowered wheel well test and inspection times by 70%.
Before the locator update, engineers mostly used IVT to make sure airplane parts were manufactured properly, and they needed to manually type in part numbers to create reports. Now, aircraft-production employees can access part number and specifics by looking at 3D aircraft images and clicking on a part.
Boeing says it will continue to provide easier access to aircraft data and explore more ways IVT can boost productivity.
To help local high school students and graduates prepare to compete for high-tech jobs, the City of Santa Monica, Calif., has been boosting interest in technology careers through its Youth Tech Program. The program is a partnership between the city and area tech companies that provides local teens with an overview of information technology in the real world and teaches them what it's like to work for a startup company.
Teens shadow city IT staff to observe how they use technology to improve traffic conditions, keep buses running on time, and manage city assets. They configure Cisco 3560 switches, design network architectures, and learn about SQL and Oracle databases, virtualization, storage trends, and agile development strategies, participating in a scrum coding session with city Web developers. Then they spend five weeks at Coloft, a privately owned shared work space in Santa Monica, working alongside entrepreneurs, designers, and developers to create a startup business concept. Program graduates have access to city staff as mentors and use them to understand how the city supports the community.
New York-Presbyterian Hospital's bedside tablet project replaces traditional nurse call buzzers with tablets that patients can also use to access personal health data. The hospital has operated a MyNYP.org website based on Microsoft HealthVault since 2009, but it's been a personal health records (PHR) portal for patients to use from home. Now the portal is also an in-patient bedside communications tool. Patients are often barraged by information, and the tablets let them browse information about their condition through the portal. They can also use the tablets to access free entertainment.
When patients use the tablets to call for help, they can be more specific, helping nurses cut down on the clamor associated with the old system.
In the pilot test, NYP deployed tablets to two surgical nursing units with 69 beds, providing each bed with a tablet. It has proven cost-effective, taking advantage of existing network infrastructure. NYP says it's spending $500,000 on software development, whereas it estimated the cost of additional lines to the nurse call system at $40 million. The hospital says it hopes to provide a bedside tablet for every patient.
Imagine taking delivery of 18 tons of rock from an ATM machine. That, in essence, is what Martin Marietta Materials Inc.'s automated, unattended, scaling system achieves.
"Scaling" in IT usually means adding more servers; for Martin Marietta Materials, the term refers to weighing trucks full of materials.
Scaling is both expensive and challenging as it usually requires a full-time scale operator and a backup operator. Martin Marietta Materials has nearly 300 locations throughout North America.
For lesser-used quarries, Martin Marietta Materials' Information Services team developed a remote scaling system that combines network-based cameras, wired and wireless networks, voice-over-IP intercom systems, remote desktops, traffic lights, message boards, remote ticket printers, and self-service kiosks.
Truck drivers can now swipe an RFID card with customer information, job number, truck number, and the empty truck weight, which then updates the company's ERP system for invoicing. Martin Marietta Materials is using the remote scaling system at five sand and gravel plants in Ohio. A centralized team of scale operators could conceivably cover 30 weigh stations, however.
In 2013, Ultimate Software's technology organization created UCloud, a platform-as-a-service that connects IT development to IT operations for delivering reliable code more quickly.
It combines a development methodology that integrates the speed and continuous software delivery sought by development teams with the stability sought by IT operations teams.
The results: Through UCloud, Ultimate has increased its number of builds per day from 600 to 1,800, and its build quality from 83% successful to 98% successful. It also has delivered 20% more features per release, and has decreased the time required to make new features available. Infrastructure that once took two to six months to deploy now can be implemented on demand.
Previously, critical delivery processes were manual and time-consuming. Developers would send code to testers, then to performance stability testing, then to the build team, then to another group to push it to production. It took too long, with a high risk of build failures.
With UCloud, completed code can be checked into the source code repository, tested automatically, and then deployed to production with a click.
When premature or sick babies are admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit, it can mean families are separated from the newborn for days, weeks, or months. To help parents and relatives bond with critically ill infants, Texas Health Resources developed Peek-A-Boo Neonatal ICU, which gives them virtual access to their baby.
The Peek-A-Boo Neonatal ICU consists of a Web camera and speakers, which are mounted over each baby's isolette. Families can then log on through any Web-enabled device to see and talk to the baby.
Texas Health Resources says the addition of Peek-A-Boo Neonatal ICU has helped reduce stress for parents and families by letting them see, speak to, and sing to their babies at any time. It gives families more access to their infants outside of the strict NICU time restrictions, and it helps families bond and connect with their babies even when they need to return to work or travel long distances to the hospital.
Spirit AeroSystems specializes in designing and manufacturing major aircraft components. Massive Boeing 787 fuselage parts and other large structures move down Spirit's production lines hooked to giant overhead cranes in buildings the size of city blocks. That production produces a river of data -- data flowing in from other manufacturers and customers, combined with in-house production and test data.
Since Spirit's 2005 divestiture from Boeing, its customer base has grown to include other global aircraft manufacturers, with 2013 revenue of $6 billion and a $41 billion backlog of orders to fill. Keeping the production line moving is critical to the health of the business, so Spirit used SAP's HANA in-memory database and BusinessObjects analytics tools to pinpoint sources of delay.
Its dashboard application, dubbed Buffer Incursion Charts, has so far produced a two-day flow-time reduction and nearly $2 million in inventory-level reductions. Once it has implemented the technology in all assembly areas, the company expects to achieve across-the-board reductions of 25% in production flow times, 30% in assembly inventory levels, and 40% in overtime expenses.
The State of Michigan knew it had a cybersecurity problem when audits showed minimal employee participation in security training and technical staff lacking adequate security training and access to tools. It also knew many businesses faced similar problems.
Seeking a cost-effective fix, the CIO Office worked with businesses facing the same problems to develop joint training, awareness, and outreach programs. Internally, the state used a gamified security awareness program from Security Mentor, which cost $200,000 for 12 self-paced lessons -- about 30 cents per lesson per employee over two years for 50,000 employees. The software program allowed the state to close 11 problems the audit found.
The state also helped create the Michigan Cyber Range, a professional cybersecurity training and testing facility for state and business partner use, at a cost of $2 million. Grants and donations covered 80% of the costs, so only 20% came from government sources. The state is saving 40% to 50% on training and anticipates a five-year savings of over $500,000 in certification, course, and travel costs.
The public-private partnership also began a series of cyber summits and breakfast conferences, which are paid for by sponsorships and attendee fees.
Cerner, a healthcare technology company, has 14,000 employees interacting with hundreds of thousands of global clients. Groups in charge of marketing, sales, service quoting and contracting, consulting, and support each generate data about those interactions, but Cerner captured that data through a disparate and growing number of systems. It wanted to get a coherent view of that activity without getting locked into one enterprise software vendor. So Cerner developed a client intelligence portal, called Delphi, that consolidates data from 17 CRM, quoting, and contracting systems.
Semantic search lets employees use queries such as "CEO of Children's Hospital" to look for a contact. In addition to pulling data from structured records, the system analyzes patterns in email and phone traffic between employees and clients for additional clues to who knows whom. That knowledge lets salespeople replace cold calls with personal introductions and encourages smoother hand-offs between employees and clients.
To build better hospitals, Skanska USA turned to the iPad.
Skanska's home-grown iOS app, called Prognos, generates building cost estimates in real time. Skanska construction experts can use the app with companies considering building or renovating a hospital to help them calculate the number of hospital beds, number of floors, size of emergency department, and more.
The app uses local construction costs and zoning information for accuracy. Prognos then allows "what-if" analyses of energy usage and square-foot efficiency, thus helping planners calculate ROI. The program stores its calculations in the Windows Azure public cloud.
Skanska teams have used Prognos to show clients how to be 15% more efficient in construction and 30% more energy efficient, according to the company.
Skanska's Healthcare Center of Excellence and its IT organization joined forces to develop, test, and deploy Prognos in a matter of weeks. It relies on a color-coded interface for data entry and calculations, and it's available through the Skanska App Store. Although Skanska created Prognos for the healthcare market, the company plans to use the app in other markets such as commercial construction and aviation.
Electronic health record systems gather patient data for multiple purposes -- billing and medical research, as well as patient care. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center decided doctors needed a patient-centric view. Its goal was to organize data around "care pathways" relevant to the patient's condition, in order to make sure doctors didn't have to hunt through the system for relevant information.
The new collaboration system, called Convergence, is designed to pull data from one or more EHRs and present it as a unified view of health data, allowing clinicians to toggle into the applications as necessary.
UPMC conducted early pilots in its cardiology department, and it plans to deploy the system more broadly internally and work with an industry partner to make the software commercially available in 2015. UPMC demoed Convergence at HIMSS, the health IT conference, in February.
UPMC developed the Convergence application through its Technology Development Center, with help from Microsoft and Caradigm, which is a medical software partnership between Microsoft and GE. Running on Windows 8 tablets, Convergence takes advantage of "live tiles" user interface widgets and the integration options available on Windows.
Patients who develop life-threatening sepsis infections at hospitals often have changes in their vital signs that go unnoticed. To stay ahead of sepsis, the Patient Safety and Quality team at New Jersey-based Atlantic Health System called on the company's IT group to develop an early warning system based on vital signs and lab data.
Two Atlantic Health hospitals then took the warning system and customized it. Morristown Medical Center uses a screening tool that looks at the past eight hours of patient data. If the data meets certain criteria, the system emails a "yellow" alert to care team members. If certain vital signs or lab results hit a critical value, it sends a "red" alert to a doctor or rapid response team. The hospital is still refining the tool, but preliminary results are promising.
Overlook Medical Center thought the algorithm used by Morristown sent too many alerts, so it tweaked the warning system to look at 24 hours of data rather than eight, and created a severity scale from 0 to 4. Future improvements include automatic data feeds from patient monitors and direct alerts to physicians' mobile devices.
ADP's IT and sales teams collaborated to develop three apps to help salespeople be more productive.
ADP Touch, its first application, integrates with Salesforce.com software to function as a day planner and navigator. For example, a salesperson can use Touch to identify sales leads in his region, and segment territories into employee count, competitor, and location. Before ADP Touch, salespeople relied on car navigation, laptops, and printouts to organize territory lists.
The second ADP app, Guided Selling Application (GSA), pulls in the latest collateral marketing and sales materials to help salespeople create more relevant presentations for clients. The app lets them create proposals and sales orders and lets clients sign orders directly on their iPads. Sales transactions now take 15 minutes; before ADP GSA, they took three hours.
Finally, ADP Lead Box pulls all sales leads together into one interface and shares them with other team members so none are lost or go without responses. Prior to the ADP Lead Box app, one-third of sales leads were getting lost in the pipeline. Now 99.5% of leads receive immediate responses from sales staff, the company said.
McKesson says that OneCloud, its private and public cloud project, has helped make the healthcare services and IT company more agile and improved its software development. The heart of OneCloud is a cloud-management portal where technology staff can provision new cloud servers or business applications in minutes. This helps IT deliver apps faster to McKesson's business units, which in turn serve the company's external customers.
OneCloud helps shorten the process for adding a new McKesson customer from months to weeks or days, and it decreases the cycle times for releasing new features to existing users from weeks to hours.
OneCloud also is changing McKesson's internal accounting for IT costs. IT created a financial model within OneCloud that charges business units by the day for the computing capacity they use. The tool also allows IT to examine the daily run rate (a projection of future usage based on current usage) of cloud services and adjust cloud capacity accordingly. Also, by bringing in more business units on the same IT service platform, McKesson can juggle workloads across the organization, and thus has reduced virtual server costs by 30%.
In April 2013, PNC Financial Services Group launched its Cash Flow Insight application to help small businesses take better control of their cash flow management.
Cash Flow Insight provides reports and tools to help owners understand their cash flow. It automates some clerical tasks and offers short-term forecasting, historical trending, and long-term planning tools, as well as tools for making electronic payments and digitizing documents. PNC developed the app in HTML5 to maximize mobile device support.
PNC hopes the apps will help the bank build closer ties with small business customers, improve retention rates, and get more customers to use PNC's digital channels.
WinWholesale supplies domestic and industrial supplies and materials. It consists of more than 550 wholesaling corporations in which WinWholesale has an ownership stake. WinWholesale provides each of these corporations with access to procedure documentation, IT tools, and centralized support resources to help them run their business. However, the corporations did not have sophisticated tools or analytics to understand who their best customers were. They struggled with how to grow revenue and reduce the cost to serve customers, the company says.
To address this problem, WinWholesale's IT department built a new set of analytical reports specific to customer segmentation, called WinReports. The reports classified customers into groups based on profitability, revenue, loyalty, and cost-to-serve, for example.
WinReports focuses on four areas to help the wholesaling corporations become more profitable. It helps them keep core customers by building stronger relationships; grow core customers by identifying products they might need but aren't buying; transform non-core customers to core by analyzing customer behavior; and reprice customers. The last area entails classifying customers into one of four groups: core, opportunistic, service drain, or marginal.
After using WinReports for six months, the top 20 wholesaling corporations saw a 22% increase in operating profit compared to the year before, the company said.
Do smart machines and big data have a place in farming? John Deere's customers think so, and Deere has led a major push to make its farm equipment "smarter."
The company ditched USB sticks and implemented wireless data transfer using GreenStar 2630 displays mounted on John Deere tractors, combines, and other equipment in the field. This technology lets farmers wirelessly transmit field data to and from Internet-connected farm equipment and view it on MyJohnDeere.com, saving hours of driving and manually pulling data from machines via USB sticks. Deere also created a location feature called Location-History, also available on MyJohnDeere.com, which lets farm managers view the progress of tractors and combines.
To make sense of the data, Deere added analysis and reporting tools to the site, presenting farm managers with at-a-glance field production data including acres-per-crop-type, average yield, and average moisture. The site pulls the data wirelessly from Internet- and GPS-enabled combines. Deere also publishes APIs to let third-party software makers build applications to plug in to MyJohnDeere.com, so farm managers can select tools that best meet their needs.
Commercial real estate company Jones Lang LaSalle thought it had everything its brokers would want to know about clients and opportunities in its Microsoft CRM database. There was just one problem: The brokers weren't using the system because the interface didn't give them the information in a way they could easily use.
JLL's IT and brokerage groups set about building a new interface, a software addition called Spider that augmented the existing CRM system with customized dashboards and better search capabilities. Knowing the negative perception of CRM, the firm formed a "Presence and Adoption" team to help spur use of Spider.
Within five months of launching Spider, the volume of records in the six-year-old CRM system increased by 25% as brokers used the database more. And there was a bonus: The IT group thinks the project marked a culture shift, where the rest of the company now sees IT as an innovative partner and not just a maintenance department.
Insurance Auto Auctions (IAA) hosts car auctions held in 160 branches in North America, and simulcasts live on the Internet for dismantlers, dealers, rebuilders, recyclers, and resellers around the world. Each week it features more than 29,000 vehicles up for bid.
In August 2013, IAA launched the IAA Buyer App for tablets to improve the online auction experience. The new app displays vehicle details and multiple photos so would-be buyers can get a better sense of the vehicle's condition. It also lets buyers join up to eight auctions simultaneously, alerts users if they win or are outbid, and lets them complete payment details from within the app if they win an auction. IAA said the app has improved the speed and ease at which potential car buyers can search.
Insurance Auto Auctions (IAA) hosts car auctions held in 160 branches in North America, and simulcasts live on the Internet for dismantlers, dealers, rebuilders, recyclers, and resellers around the world. Each week it features more than 29,000 vehicles up for bid.
In August 2013, IAA launched the IAA Buyer App for tablets to improve the online auction experience. The new app displays vehicle details and multiple photos so would-be buyers can get a better sense of the vehicle's condition. It also lets buyers join up to eight auctions simultaneously, alerts users if they win or are outbid, and lets them complete payment details from within the app if they win an auction. IAA said the app has improved the speed and ease at which potential car buyers can search.
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