CIO —
Round One: Best in Class
Starting in spring 2003, teams of CIO editors and Enterprise Value review board members?researchers, consultants and former CIOs?took charge of the industry categories and evaluated 150 applicants. In several of the industries, such as financial services, a who’s who of big names shared the list with smaller companies. A handful demanded consideration in each industry by demonstrating significant, core enterprise value. To choose a single winner in each industry, the review board and editor teams conducted a series of teleconferences to clarify and verify the IT systems’ data. Their interviews with IT leaders, business sponsors, end users, customers and third-party industry experts stretched through the summer.
"The review board members are trained researchers, have seen quite a few systems and applications, and as a result, they ask the tough questions to really find out about the enterprise value the applicant is getting from the system," says Richard W. Swanborg, Awards cochair and president and founder of research group ICEX.
Weighing the evidence, the teams made their choices in September, selecting one organization from each of 10 industry categories to take home a CIO Enterprise Value Award. Interestingly, in a number of industries, including the aforementioned financial services, it was a little guy who garnered the prize, beating out Fortune 500 titans.
"The natural tendency would be to think that the largest of the companies would have the most interesting and highest value technology," notes Sheila Smith, review board member and managing partner of Omega Point Consulting. "But in fact, some of the smaller companies were actually doing very innovative things and providing more value, relatively speaking, for their enterprise."
Round Two: Peer Review
Next, it was up to the review board to convey each winner’s passion to a panel of CIO judges. Their task was to pick one organization to win the Grand CIO Enterprise Value Award.
Sequestered in a Boston hotel conference room on Nov. 11, 2003, the four CIO judges listened to review board members present the details, strengths and ROI of the 10 industry winners’ systems. Awards Cochair Abbie Lundberg, editor in chief of CIO, clarified questions of criteria and made sure the judges observed the ground rules. The CIOs rated the companies’ systems in five areas of impact: strategic, customer, financial, operational and social. Lundberg steered the judges away from speculation, asking that they consider only the enterprise value that already had been secured, not what the enterprise might (or might not) realize down the road. She also settled an unusual quandary when the judges identified value that had been overlooked by one of the industry winners. Should they credit the company with this value or consider only what the company identified in its application? Lundberg decided that the judges should base their decision on only what had been identified in the application. (A company that can’t recognize value is unlikely to realize it.)
