The technology has not yet been fully deployed, but it shows the potential to monitor all the university's energy utilization and adjust as needed to get a carbon neutral environment, said Tracy Futhey, vice president of IT and CIO at Duke. That goal could be reached in just a few years, Futhey added.

Among the projects that were nominated was one by the Canadian National Railway (CN) that's still in progress. CN is working with vendor HCL Axon to develop a SAP module that would improve scheduling for its train crews.

The railway has 120 years of history governing what has become the "extremely complex" process of managing its crews, said Alan Capes, director of IT business development at CN.

Capes said the goal of the latest project is to improve the work and life balance of train crews, as well as to let them gain access to scheduling information through mobile devices like smartphones.

Kipp Bertke, IT manager for the Ohio Department of Development of Disabilities, was cited by the Honors program for a system built from scratch in-house to replace a paper-based system used by 90,000 plus caregivers.