InfoWorld’s CTO 25 winners have the right stuff

Five years in, and the quality keeps improving. I’m talking about InfoWorld’s CTO 25 award winners, our annual crop of high achievers who have pushed their companies’ IT efforts to new heights over the past year. In this incarnation of the awards, not only did we see a record number of nominees, but we were bowled over by the qualifications and the sheer accomplishments of so many of the candidates. Read the highly distilled results of that embarrassment of riches — a collection of 25 profiles.

The InfoWorld CTO 25 has traditionally recognized IT leaders who have figured out how to do more with less — a reasonable agenda for an accolade conceived in the teeth of the economic downturn. And, in fact, our awards still favor tech execs who can wring efficiency out of their IT operations. Today, though, our panel of judges has refined that criterion, keying in on the ability to drive business value through IT.

“CTOs have become more dialed in to the role of IT,” says Executive Editor Eric Knorr, who oversaw the awards process. “They recognize it’s not some autonomous unit, but rather an integral part of the business that must support business goals.” A solid five years after the bubble burst, the lessons from that difficult period have been fully absorbed. “No one does anything in IT unless it’s attached to a business objective,” Knorr adds. “And no one has political sway in an organization just as a techno-wonk.”

That said, all 25 of our honorees have the requisite techno-wonk chops, although they exercise those skills in different ways.

There are the visionaries: guys like Mike Stonebraker (onetime co-creator of Ingres and Postgres), whose latest product tackles an entirely new area — real-time message processing at the database level. Then we’ve got the “modernizers” like Suzanne Peck, CTO of Washington, D.C., who brought automation to city government where none had existed before. And finally, there are the business alignment masters, like John Smith, whose laser focus on enabling business process has allowed Benefitfocus.com to greatly expand its offerings.

Speaking of important contributions, thanks for your responses to my request for enterprise hacks of note. A passel of these heroic work-arounds appears online, and several others came to me via e-mail.

My favorite hack job so far? It’s got to be from Walter M. Pawley, who asked, “How about the time I ‘wrote’ an ‘operating system’ via the toggle switches on the front panel of an SEL 810A?” I have no idea how to construct a toggle-switch-based OS for a ’60s-era minicomputer, but the concept certainly tickled my fancy. Talk about deriving value from IT!