The Corporate IT Forum rewarded Zizzi for its 'Pennies with Zizzi' project, which involved working with The Pennies Foundation charity to create an electronic charity box that allows customers paying by card at the restaurant to donate spare change to charity.

"Zizzi showed its determination to create a way of supporting casual donations in the new age of electronic payment. They paid close attention to communications to make sure all stakeholders - particularly customers - would embrace it.

"We were very impressed by the way this was driven by the IT department," said the Real IT Awards judges, which included representatives from DHL, Laing O'Rourke and South West Water.

The Real IT Awards aims to celebrate companies that develop innovative IT projects to deliver efficiencies in the business. However, this year, the awards were dominated by more socially-aware projects.

"What is particularly striking this year is that the innovation we are seeing is in areas where IT is giving something back, rather than where it is solely focused on delivering cost-savings and doing more with less," said John Harris, chairman of The Corporate IT Forum.