Those who see information technology as little more than cold hardware and digits on a screen should have seen Collin Jardine as he accepted an award for his health care organization at last night"s Computerworld Honors awards ceremony. Jardine manages computer services for the Northern Lights Health Region in northern Alberta, Canada. This health organization has been using telemedicine to deliver care to 70,000 people living in widely dispersed areas "that might otherwise go without," said Jardine, who had to pause several times to keep his composure as he talked about what the technology has meant.
The applause for this Honors winner in medicine was long and warm.
Although the Computerworld Honors Program recognizes a broad range of IT accomplishments across multiple industries, last night"s ceremony seemed to belong to those using technology to directly improve the lives of people in need, such as Aidmatrix, which won the award in the government and nonprofit category.
This 1-year-old organization is using supply chain technology to create an online system that matches donors with charitable groups by allowing participants in "real time to see donations being made available," said Scott McCallum, a former Wisconsin governor who now heads the Dallas-based global relief network.
"For a marketplace to work, you need information; Aidmatrix technology provides the information system to take what would be waste and match it with those that are in need," said McCallum.
The Computerworld Honors Program recognizes companies, nonprofits, governments and individuals who have made significant contributions to IT. An independent panel of judges reviews entries in 10 categories. The 160 case studies whose "achievements most deserve remembrance in the annals of IT history" are then given to some 120 museums and libraries, said Bob Carrigan, Computerworld Inc."s president and CEO.
Among those honored was Ralph Szygenda, the CIO and group vice president of IT at General Motors Corp., who received this year"s top award, the EMC Information Leadership Award.
Szygenda became GM"s first CIO in 1996 and inherited a mess of some 7,000 systems that cost the automaker more than US$4 billion a year. He has since reduced the number of systems to about 3,000 and has cut IT spending by about $1.2 billion.
Szygenda"s 35 years of experience is wide ranging, including work on supercomputing, the development of imagery interpretation systems for the U.S. Air Force, avionic system development and weather modeling. He is also a former CIO of Texas Instruments.
"Why should somebody give me an award for something I actually enjoy doing?" said Szygenda. "I owe a tremendous amount to this industry," he said.
Axciom Corp."s work on grid computing provided evidence of the constant changes under way in the industry. The Little Rock, Ark.-based company processes and analyzes massive amounts of data using a 6,000-node grid, with each node made up of two CPUs.
The grid provides "on-demand business scalability," said Chuck Howland, Axciom"s grid infrastructure group leader. The company has been working on its grid for several years, and the grid has doubled in size over the past year. The company now has the ability to increase it by about 1,500 nodes a quarter.
By using a grid, Axciom can harness the computing capability it needs to run virtually any process, whether it"s something that needs to be completed in one day or one hour, said Howland, whose company won top honors in the business category.
Another company honored last night was GM"s OnStar Corp. unit, which provides a communication link for motorists whose cars are equipped with the service. It can be used when there has been an accident and a driver needs immediate help.
OnStar President Chet Huber said the service now has over 3.5 million subscribers and responds to 1,000 airbag deployments a month.
"We know it"s had a meaningful impact already in terms of -- not only saved lives -- but in many thousands of cases [of reduced] injuries" because it speeds emergency response to accidents, he said.