However, some of the technologies being used as part of the grid project are anything but cutting-edge. The stock exchange did recently upgrade to the latest 10g versions of Oracle Corp.'s database, clustering tools and application server software. But Milne said it is running the Oracle software on four servers based on Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Alpha processor, which HP no longer develops and will stop selling in systems this October.
Some of the HP AlphaServer systems were even bought secondhand, Milne said. Nonetheless, they are delivering high service levels and sparing the exchange from having to buy a single large system to accommodate the clustered database, according to Milne. He added that when he needs more computing power, he can go out and buy "what was at one point Cadillac technology at a commodity price, and still do better [on performance] than what the high-end commodity products are doing today."
The Chicago Stock Exchange received a 21st Century Achievement Award for its grid project in the finance, insurance and real estate category at last week's ceremony. The award illustrates a key aspect of some of this year's winning projects: Having the latest or greatest technology isn't always as important as how systems are assembled to reduce costs and deliver new services to end users.
Another award winner whose project fits a similar mold is Cambridge, Mass.-based Zipcar Inc., which operates a car-sharing service in more than 30 U.S. cities.
Zipcar's self-service system lets customers make reservations over the Internet or by telephone and then use smart cards embedded with radio frequency identification tags to gain access to rental vehicles parked in designated on-street spaces. The company, which was honored in the transportation category, uses Cingular Wireless LLC's data network to track its cars and send information about reservations to specialized black-box devices that are in each vehicle.
Roy Russell, vice president of technology at Zipcar, said that the wireless car-sharing system was made possible by "a lot of [technology] pieces that are really geared to self-service." Unable to buy what it needed to make the system work, the company built everything itself -- from the reservations system to the in-vehicle devices. It even created a proprietary data-transmission protocol in order to avoid the overhead created by TCP/IP.
Zipcar has 55,000 members, which it serves with a total of about 1,000 cars. Russell claimed that the company has helped take 30,000 cars off the streets in urban areas because city residents are using its service for transportation instead of driving their own vehicles. Zipcar also says its members report that they are driving less and walking, biking or using public transportation more often than they used to.
Such benefits are in line with the goals of the Computerworld Honors Program, which recognizes companies, nonprofit organizations and government agencies for using technology to promote economic, educational and social advancements. An independent panel of 33 CIO-level judges chose this year's 10 award winners from among five finalists in each category.
Two individual awards were also presented, including one given to Hector Ruiz, chairman and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. At the awards ceremony, Ruiz underscored a theme that fits many of the honored projects: using technology to improve the greater good. Ruiz said that people throughout the world "are desperately clamoring for the opportunity to have access" to technology.
The New York City Police Department's IT unit received one of the loudest rounds of applause during the ceremony, for its effort to rebuild the NYPD's technology infrastructure and improve the police force's ability to fight crime. The NYPD won the 21st Century Achievement Award in the government and nonprofit organizations category for a data warehouse project that will eventually consolidate information about crimes from as many as 60 data sources.
The police department also has equipped officers with wireless system-access capabilities, deployed new data mining tools, improved links with a variety of federal and international databases, and begun visual mapping of criminal incidents, said Jim Onalfo, the NYPD's deputy commissioner and CIO.
Onalfo came out of retirement in 2003 to run the police department's IT operations after previously working for 30-plus years as CIO at Kraft Foods Inc. "It's been the most rewarding experience of my entire life," Onalfo said of his work at the NYPD. "What we do makes it safer for police officers and safer for the city and citizens of New York."
Before the NYPD built its data warehouse, detectives at the scene of a crime didn't have access to data that could help them solve it, Onalfo said. Now, he added, they and other officers can get information from the NYPD's databases via the wireless links, which "helps get the job done faster."
Passion about technology was also displayed last week by Bruno Friedll, systems support manager at Zurich-based Neue Zurcher Zeitung AG, one of the largest newspaper publishers in Switzerland.
Neue Zurcher won the award in the media, arts and entertainment category for its Archive 1780 project, which put every issue published by the newspaper over its 225-year history into a digital format using an automated imaging process. The archive includes about 2 million scanned newspaper pages amounting to 10TB of data and can be searched online by readers.
Friedll talked about the difficulty of converting Gothic-style text into digital information as part of the project. But when asked about the value of the work and its expected return to the company, he offered a simple but telling answer. "The value is making history accessible," he said.
BellSouth Corp. received the award in the business and related services category for developing an Amber Alert notification system that sends information about missing children to the laptops of more than 13,000 field technicians via an IP link and Cingular's wireless data radio network. The hope is that a technician might spot a missing child or a vehicle mentioned in one of the alerts and notify law enforcement officials.
And BellSouth isn't keeping the technology to itself. Jim Wheeler, general manager of network systems at the Atlanta-based company, said it is making the intellectual property behind the notification system freely available to other companies so they can set up their own programs for sending alerts to employees.