UNICEF developed its "Fly-Away" to be able to deliver IT services anywhere in the world. It provides voice over IP, facsimiles, email, and Internet services -- and lets its workers in the field connect to UNICEF's corporate IT systems. Setting up the portable telecommunications system doesn't require technical expertise,Shannak added .
Shannak said commercial systems with similar functions can cost more than $100,000. UNICEF's IT department assembles its Fly-Away system for no more than $20,000 and as little as $5,000, depending on what equipment is included, said Shannak. "We could not afford anything else," he said.
UNICEF's IT effort took the top honors in the non-profit category of the annual at an event here last night. This annual contest was launched in 1988 as an effort to create a record of technology innovation. A number of libraries and universities have been collecting these case studies from around the world to build an ongoing history of IT.
The IT projects recognized by the Honors Program judges are wide ranging. For instance, Intelligent Hospital Systems uses intravenous delivery system that last night won a leadership award in health care. This system automatically prepares IV systems to ensure exact dosages and labels. The technology addresses "a labor intensive and error prone process," said Thomas Doherty, CTO of the Winnipeg, Manitoba-based firm.
The winner in the environment, energy and agriculture category was Austin Energy in Texas for its work on system. Andres Carvallo, Austin Energy's CIO, said he expects that by 2015 the grid will help determine whether there are enough power resources on hand to power thousands of electric vehicles expected to be in Austin at the time, and the price they will pay.
Many applicants, of course, don't make it to finals of the Honors Program contest, but their stories are an indication of the direction of enterprise IT operations.
For example, Indiana University in Bloomington created what it calls an " " to support teaching and research." Part of the effort involves using virtualization technology to consolidate as many as 400 physical servers to 30 systems. Some 800 virtual machines are now supported on four socket, quad chip servers, said Robert Lowden, director of enterprise infrastructure, who estimated that the project's cost savings for the university are now approaching $1 million.
And the Brooklyn Health Information Exchange in New York is working with a number of hospitals, nursing homes and other health care providers to create a method sharing information. Health care providers now keep patient information mostly on internal systems -- and sometimes not even in an electronic format, said Irene Koch, the exchange's executive director. By enabling the sharing of information to follow patients, "we are going to improve the care by reducing errors, reducing duplication and creating efficiencies."
The Morgan Stanley Leadership Award for Global Commerce went to two NetApp Inc. executives, Chairman and CEO Daniel Warmenhoven and Tom Mendoza, the company's vice chairman. The pair are credited with overseeing a company that has grown from 45 employees in 1994 to about 8,000 today.