Tech done right: The 2014 InfoWorld Technology Leadership Awards

Leading technology — as a creator, manager, implementer, and business catalyst — is no small feat even in the course of running IT or a business. Technology changes rapidly, and it often becomes increasingly complex. The problems and opportunities to which it is applied are equally variable, messy, and involved; the easy “just add automation” problems have already been addressed.

Technology leadership in its four key forms is at the heart of InfoWorld’s mission, and the InfoWorld Technology Leadership Awards honor those who have been exceptional technology leaders over the past two years. No “we did it in six weeks” projects here — true technology leadership spans constituencies and technologies, often exemplified by projects months in the making.

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The TLAs have a broad mission to recognize two key shifts in IT.

First, deployment is no longer the main game for IT, even if it remains the bulk of effort spent. Instead, creating value through technology — within IT, of course, but also by helping the business grow — is where leadership matters. As technology increasingly permeates the business, IT is providing more businesswide inspiration. Not just the CIO or CTO — IT project managers, admins, architects, and the like are equally capable of contributing, so the TLAs honor leaders regardless of title.

Second, technology is no longer the sole province of IT. Nearly every businessperson today has been using technology at work and at home for two decades, and most are more than passably familiar with a variety of computer technologies. Thus, limiting technology to the high priests of IT is untenable. But so is the notion that the business is simply a customer of IT; that too suggests a “father knows best” mentality. It’s no accident that the main technology drivers of business change were pushed not by IT but by businesspeople in the past two decades: the PC, the Internet, cloud computing, mobile computing, and increasingly social technology. Thus, the TLAs look for technology leadership anywhere in the business, not just within IT.

The 2014 TLAs showcase such leadership across the business and IT, as well as across roles. IT professionals remain the heart of technology leadership — no surprise to us, given the passion and creativity many technologists bring to the table. Our winners, selected by a panel of InfoWorld editors from nearly 100 nominees, fall into four categories of leadership:

• IT management, which honors technologists who assert leadership in the realm of IT, typically around management and enablement of IT as a whole.
• Technology deployment, which honors the most exceptional leadership in the types of challenges IT faces day in and day out: designing, deploying, and maintaining the technology systems that the business depends on to succeed. It’s no surprise this category had the greatest number of nominations.

The TLAs have no set number of winners, nor need there be honorees in each category. We’re looking for the best, period.

We’ve found it, as the 2014 Technology Leadership Awards winners show. We present them in alphabetical order within each category:

Business management:

• Clint Jones, GoHealth Insurance

IT management:

• Edward Cormier, Internal Revenue Service
• Jake Dominguez, AMD
• Prasad Mandava, Akamai Technologies

Technology creation/management:

• Sanjib Sahoo, TradeMonster Group
• Kimberly Stevenson, Intel
• Jesus Unzueta, Sirva Worldwide

Technology deployment:

• Karen McNamara, HD Supply

2014 InfoWorld Technology Leadership Awards:

Technology creation/management

Clint Jones, CEO, GoHealth Insurance

Even before the botched rollout of the federal Obamacare enrollment website HealthCare.gov last fall, along with the failure of state versions in Oregon and elsewhere, there were fears that the Affordable Care Act-mandated enrollment systems would not work as promised, go live on schedule, or handle the expected load.

At the GoHealth insurance exchange — essentially, a portal for getting insurance quotes and connecting customers to agents and providers to purchase insurance — CEO Clint Jones saw what was going and decided to act. HealthCare.gov and its state equivalents were complex undertakings, and many government exchanges had difficulties with their online health insurance exchanges. So Jones asked, “Why not provide an alternative venue for those seeking coverage under Obamacare?”

But the timeframe was tight. GoHealth swiftly hired new talent, formed an agreement with the federal agency managing Obamacare (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) to integrate with its system, and enhanced its technology platform to support Obamacare plans in addition to traditional ones in its exchange. The integration with the federal system allowed GoHealth to estimate consumers’ federal tax subsidy information and apply the tax credits directly to a health insurance plan.

GoHealth hired and trained nearly 600 people in 90 days. During the training program, many of the new hires earned their licenses to become health insurance advisers who can walk consumers through the enrollment process and recommend health plans.

As a result of this gamble, GoHealth became the first private online exchange capable of enrolling Americans in the subsidized Obamacare health insurance plans, even as the federal HealthCare.gov website struggled to work properly.

2014 InfoWorld Technology Leadership Awards:

IT management

Edward Cormier, director of unified communications, Internal Revenue Service

Unlike other enterprise unified communications (UC) deployments, the IRS Convergence initiative faced several unique challenges: No other implementation includes a 95,000-plus user base with a fully integrated UC capability augmented with centralized SIP trunking services (a method of delivering voice over IP to traditional PBX systems).

Under Cormier’s guidance, the Convergence team designed and implemented in eight months a highly scalable and redundant end-to-end UC system that integrates with back-end enterprise applications. It also designed and fully vetted a SIP trunking security architecture with the IRS cyber security organization, as well as implemented the SIP carrier service.

Cormier says the redundancy and failover features of the architecture, along with the dynamic overflow of the carrier services, are unique in the industry. They also provide the IRS with high availability while minimizing idle capacity and cost.

Convergence required a complex and well-orchestrated site selection and deployment strategy. Not only did the site deployments need to accommodate failing and at-risk infrastructures, the deployment plans needed to accommodate real estate moves. The deployment strategy also needed to adhere to IRS filing-season limitations, including blackout periods that prohibit work on production systems and general filing-season protocols that limited transitions.

Outside the technology front, Cormier had to manage a tricky budget process made trickier by lean budgets in the face of the recent recession. Convergence is a multiyear project, but federal funding is allocated annually based on overall agency priorities and the project’s delivered value to the government, so the budgets can vary year to year. To keep funding levels consistent enough to prevent the program from yo-yoing up and down, Cormier continually “sold” the program by maintaining updated investment management plans and actively engaging the IRS CTO, associate CIOs, business commissioners, and other senior executives to promote the savings and value of the project to the agency.

As a result of this leadership and the technology team’s efforts, the result was the first successful large-scale, enterprise-wide deployment of a unified communications system in the federal government.

2014 InfoWorld Technology Leadership Awards:

IT management

Jake Dominguez, CIO, AMD

Chipmaker AMD’s data center in Austin, Texas, was outdated. In addition, power was expensive in Texas, as were the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) licenses required for its operations. The IT department recognized that the company could no longer afford to manage the costs of the Austin data center.

Last September, AMD transitioned its entire Austin data center’s technology and infrastructure to a new Tier 3 facility in Atlanta without hiring any external contractors — and did so under a tight timeline, coming in two months ahead of schedule. The consolidation effort upgraded more than 75 percent of applications to take advantage of newer hardware, newer OS versions, newer database versions, and in some cases, newer application versions. The relocation saved AMD $6.8 million a year in power costs and operations licenses.

The project successfully virtualized 87 percent of nongrid servers, an increase from 60 percent, allowing AMD to recover valuable rack and floor space. The consolidation upgraded the corporate services infrastructure to take advantage of newer platforms, routers, networking, and firewall equipment. The transition to a larger private cloud helped the company save money, while at the same time increase productivity and efficiencies for its engineers, says CIO Jake Dominguez.

In addition, the data center consolidation project helped AMD improve power and cooling efficiency, ultimately reducing the company’s carbon footprint: AMD lowered its Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating to 1.56 in Atlanta from roughly 1.7 in Austin.

AMD is now continuing with its data center consolidation, working to consolidate its 18 data center facilities, located in the United States and Asia, to two locations — Atlanta and Cyberjaya, Malaysia — by 2016.

AMD’s data center consolidation resulted in several innovative efficiencies, including greater employee productivity and information security with the use of internal transactional zones and firewalls.

The effort wasn’t just about relocating to a cheaper location and building an efficient data center from scratch rather than spending more to refit the existing data center. “We took AMD’s IT department from maintenance to mission, by transitioning the company so that it could generate greater business innovation activity,” Dominguez says.

AMD, like many other organizations, was spending most of its IT money on maintenance: 70 percent was going to maintenance and only 30 percent toward innovation. Now that spend is 60 percent on innovation and 40 percent maintenance, and the goal is to reach an 80 percent IT spending level on innovation.

2014 InfoWorld Technology Leadership Awards:

IT management

Prasad Mandava, director of enterprise applications engineering, Akamai Technologies

It’s a problem many organizations face: Different groups use different customer management systems, creating roadblocks to working together effectively and, worse, to servicing customers optimally.

At Internet/cloud networking optimization provider Akamai, the Customer Care team and Professional Services were on different CRM systems than the sales organization. This made the synchronization of customer information onerous and opened the door for incomplete records and information disconnects among the various customer-facing organizations. In addition, the potential for cooperation and collaboration was missed.

So Akamai decided to move everyone to the Salesforce.com Service Cloud and FinancialForce tools used by the sales team, both for a unified view of the customer and for the concomitant benefits of improved insights into customer behaviors and information sharing among departments.

Where necessary to support unique workflow processes, the IT team integrated cloud services with both legacy and new custom applications. That wasn’t easy. “There was so much tight coupling of business functions and systems that initially it was hard to know where to start,” says Prasad Mandava, director of enterprise applications engineering. “Whenever something was changed, some other thing would break — it was surprising how many previously undocumented systems and/or interfaces came into the scope of this project than were originally anticipated.”

The highly planned and tested year-long effort “really stretched best practices in project management, with a highly distributed project team,” notes Mandava. IT team members were in Massachusetts, California, North Carolina, and India, and business project leads were in London, San Francisco, and Seattle.

The new CRM system went live over a 24-hour period in December 2013 in more than 20 sites across the globe, following an intense four-week in-house training program involving webinars, classroom training, and online training for 1,000 employees around the world. When the systems went live, starting in Australia, there were no problems or disruptions.

Even better, Akamai now has a platform on which new features can be deployed, such as an online customer community for customers to exchange information, discuss business issues, solve problems, and generate ideas.

Of course, despite the fact that the existing systems were not perfect, people were used to those existing systems that had served them well, and they were apprehensive about the change. But the planning, testing, and training paid off: Notes Akamai CIO Kumud Kalia, “I’m used to hearing things from users like ‘we love it’ when a new system is implemented, but this was the first time I heard ‘we love you’ — yes, we received proclamations of love from our business users! As someone who has implemented many new systems over the years, it doesn’t get better than that.”

2014 InfoWorld Technology Leadership Awards:

Technology creation/management

Sanjib Sahoo, CTO, TradeMonster Group

In 2012, the talk of the town was HTML5, the browser language that was supposed to become the lingua franca for mobile apps, letting developers create one app for a wide range of mobile platforms, as well as desktop ones. Debates raged between those advocating for HTML5 mobile development and those urging native development.

Online trading platform TradeMonster was already well regarded on the desktop, but it wanted to have a compelling mobile version, too. However, it had little money for its development efforts. CTO Sanjib Sahoo took a big bet and decided to create the company’s mobile apps in HTML5 rather than in iOS’s Objective-C and Android’s Java. At the time, there were no high-speed transaction applications developed in HTML5, so it was a real leap of faith. The span of that leap became clear at the end of 2012 when Facebook abandoned its use of HTML5 for its mobile apps, saying the Web language wasn’t up to snuff.

But TradeMonster was well under way in its mobile effort, which it launched in February 2013. Not only did the platform work, it won accolades from Barron’s and others for its iPad app’s sophisticated functonality and performance. Sahoo’s two dozen internal developers proved that HTML5 could be used for serious mobile apps, even transaction-oriented ones. Since then, the company has released apps for the iPhone and Android devices.

The secret: The TradeMonster team had to develop its own framework for using HTML5, particularly for event management, performance handling, animations, and streaming. (That framework is now patent-pending.) “The core framework is built in such a way that the time required to release a new app on a new device/OS is minimal and just requires an update to a small native wrapper,” Sahoo says.

TradeMonster’s developers had found that HTML5 is not universal; browser and platform differences mean that the code is not truly one-size-fits-all, which had tripped up other developers. “It is not a true cross-platform technology, there is no standard framework,” notes Sahoo. “It creates difficulties because of device fragmentation, major bottlenecks include rendering and caching, and catering to large volumes of streaming data is tricky. Organizations have failed to create a stable, high-performance app with HTML5 due to each of those factors.”

Today, the mobile apps account for 7 percent of TradeMonster’s transactions, with 28 percent of the company’s user base doing transactions or research in them, which the company says is above industry averages.

2014 InfoWorld Technology Leadership Awards:

Technology creation/management

Kimberly Stevenson, CIO, Intel

Intel works with more 140,000 resellers who specify, design, build, and/or resell Intel-based technology products. These customers typically purchase through a network of authorized distributors, and Intel’s sales organization provides online and marketing support, as well as warranty services.

With this diverse customer base, the sales organization needed help prioritizing which customers should receive the most support, determining the optimal time in the customer’s buying cycle to contact them, and deciding what products or support to offer. Specifically, a tool was needed to help focus on customers with the greatest potential for increasing sales volume.

That’s exactly the kind of problem big data analytics is meant to address. To establish this technology expertise in her organization, CIO Kimberly Stevenson defined predictive analytics and business intelligence as one of the major multiyear strategic investments across Intel IT.

Working with the business group, Intel’s IT group created a Hadoop-based predictive analytics engine that could rank a subset of the 140,000 resellers. To do that work, the IT team first had to better understand the relationships among Intel, its resellers, and the sales organization. The sales organization supports the resellers, but it has limited data on resellers’ purchases because of ongoing changes in the resale channel and because resellers purchase directly from distributors. Also, the sales team can only work with a portion of the 140,000 resellers, so it periodically reassesses which accounts to concentrate on. The lack of complete data made that assessment inexact.

The IT team also realized Intel needed to find hidden patterns and variables in data that were not available in the sales database (such as number of employees per reseller), then automate that discovery and analysis. That’s where the use of predictive analytics came into the project.

Of course, before any analytics could be done, there needed to be the data to analyze, so the IT team started looking for data sources to mine using unsupervised clustering and supervised classification techniques, bringing it to a data warehouse in which customer profiles were created, then augmented with other data sources to determine each reseller’s revenue potential.

Today, Intel’s reseller sales teams are using the big data platform to examine the behaviors and histories of Intel’s channel partners. By learning more about these important customers, Intel is optimizing sales cycles, identifying more cross-selling and upselling opportunities, delivering better customization, and improving channel revenue, Stevenson says.

2014 InfoWorld Technology Leadership Awards:

Technology creation/management

Jesus Unzueta, global CIO, Sirva Worldwide

In 2013, Sirva Worldwide’s two moving-van lines, Allied Van Lines and North American, were using several multi-decade-old legacy systems from several — not always supportive — vendors to satisfy their operational needs. These legacy systems managed both the sales cycle and operational capacity, and in effect constrained their growth.

This outdated technology inhibited the entire organization: The van lines were weighed down by the significant human effort tied to the legacy systems, and the system supporting the independent agent network was inefficient in managing the volume of shipments, constraining available capacity for customers.

For the IT organization, maintaining and operating several isolated systems was cumbersome, labor-intensive, and error-prone. As a result, both van lines brought in 30 to 40 temporary employees each year to work on the operations team during the busy April-September season.

In the field, salespeople were required to access multiple systems to provide an accurate pricing quote to customers, often resulting in inaccuracies. And the automated flow of information was one-directional, requiring van line drivers and crews to call in to provide shipment updates.

This broken system provided an opportunity to create modern systems that would increase efficiencies and insight into Sirva’s moving operations, resulting in the better service to customers. So Global CIO Jesus Unzueta led the effort to create two new systems using in-house developers and external consultants: Quantum Leads, Appointments, and Bookings (QLAB), and Quantum Planning & Dispatch (QPD).

QLAB provides a portal to manage the entire order lifecycle, from the lead at the first customer contact through the entire sales process until the customer accepts the order. QPD drives network-wide efficiencies by optimizing capacity management and providing insight into customer shipment status. Additionally, it integrates with QPD Mobile, a tablet-based, in-truck technology (for iOS and Android) that allows drivers and crews to receive real-time updates to a shipment, as well as provide updates on the status of a shipment to the shipping agent and the van lines.

Within Sirva’s van line divisions, both network-wide systems allow for automated, multidirectional flow of information throughout the entire organization — providing real-time, demand-based pricing and enabling insight into shipment capacity.

Although Sirva Worldwide is a single company, its two van lines operate independently and in fact compete with each other. For maximum efficiency, the new system had to be common and centralized — but it had to keep the two businesses from seeing each other’s data, so there is no overlap in operational information across the van lines.

Today, the system is 80 percent deployed and has handled tens of thousands of transactions, while significantly reducing the number of temporary workers needed during the busy season. It will be fully deployed by 2015. That’s a significant uptake in Sirva’s business model, where independent agents contract the moving vans and can’t be forced to adopt new systems — they have to be convinced to make the move.

2014 InfoWorld Technology Leadership Awards:

Technology deployment

Karen McNamara, senior IT manager, HD Supply

In 2011, HD Supply’s Construction and Industrial-White Cap division decided to leave behind a legacy ERP system and begin a new ERP implementation that involved deploying 15 Oracle modules to more than 150 business locations and more than 2,200 employees.

There was pent-up demand from business executives for a better system, resulting in pressure to deliver quickly. But branch locations are spread out across the United States, and it was clear that effective user training needed to be done in person and on site in most locations.

Of course, there was the critical need to work with the business users to understand their workflows and processes, to determine which should be updated to use standard Oracle approaches and which needed to be handled in a customized way. In HD Supply’s case, White Cap-specific processes such as equipment rental and tool repair needed to be accommodated, as well as more general business workflows used by all HD Supply divisions.

To get that deep understanding and pave the way for user adoption, Senior IT Manager Karen McNamara established a “power user” system in which several employees at each location were brought in early as co-creators, beta testers, and eventually internal experts that other staff could rely on after deployment. “This program was deemed the secret sauce to the successful ERP deployment, driving local ownership to each and every store and enabling the project team to move forward with the aggressive deployment schedule,” McNamara says.

ERP deployments are often difficult projects, with many failures and some never-ending deployments — usually due as much to change-management gotchas as to technology complexity. In HD Supply’s case, the 30-month-long ERP replacement effort, completed in October 2013, avoided those pitfalls and brought the Construction and Industrial-White Cap division into a much more effective environment thanks to its strong focus on the users and the business, not the technology alone.

This story, “Tech done right: The 2014 InfoWorld Technology Leadership Awards,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.