The State Revenue Office won the award, and the accolade, for being the first government organization in the world to have an internal IT shop certified as best practice using ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library).
MBF IT collected the award for rolling out standardized data center infrastructure based on the Symantec data center foundation line of products.
Bill Robbins, Symantec Asia Pacific and Japan senior vice president, said MBF IT received the award because the project came off a success and it had the vision to "do it".
"The key stats are the fund was able to set up the ability to grow storage by more than 15 percent annually without having to add any additional staff, and IT staff productivity grew by more than 10 percent," Robbins said.
"[MBF] was able to manage a highly heterogeneous server and storage environment and by implementing this and doing it successfully, MBF was able to drive significant business value."
Tony Kesby, general manager of business solutions and services at MBF, accepted the award.
In May 2003 The Victorian State Revenue Office brought IT back in-house and in March 2004 set a goal of becoming 80 percent ITIL-compliant by June 2005. Full compliance was met late August, 2005.
Paul Broderick, commissioner of the Victorian State Revenue Office, accepted the award and said the driver for the ITIL project, after bringing the IT shop back in-house on the heels of an outsourcing project, was to become the best small IT shop in government.
"We are just a small, humble, public sector organization of about 500 people, but we do have a vision, and our vision is to be one of Victoria's best performing organizations," Broderick said.
"We see ICT as being a core part of our business and not peripheral to what we do. To become the best small IT shop in government, we embarked on a process of ITIL and ISO certification and a numbers of things to try and achieve that goal.
"We have also placed a strong emphasis on staffing; we have only 45 people in the IT area and in the last four years we have only lost three people in our organization; this award is a great tribute to the effort our people put in."