The InfoWorld 2011 Technology Leadership Awards

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

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

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Over this span, our conversations with technology leaders have alerted us to a burgeoning sea change around the use of technology at companies today. To meet this change, we evolved our CTO 25 Awards, which honored CTOs and similarly titled IT executives for outstanding technology implementation efforts, into the Technology Leadership Awards. The TLAs have a broader 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 increasingly providing businesswide inspiration. And not just the CIO or CTO — IT project managers, admins, architects, and the like are equally capable of contributing, so the TLAs now honor leaders regardless of title.

Second, technology is no longer the sole province of IT. Nearly every business person 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 2011 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 that many technologists bring to the table. Our winners, selected by a panel of InfoWorld editors, fall into four categories of leadership:

• Business Leadership, which honors technologists who assert leadership in the business itself. This leadership involves technology, but it’s not about the technology itself, more about driving business growth or innovation. The fact that the person is in IT is irrelevant; like sales, marketing, finance, manufacturing, and so on, IT employees are first and foremost employees, and these technology leaders act accordingly.
• Inside IT Leadership, which honors technologists who assert leadership in the realm of IT itself, 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 (so it’s no surprise this category had the greatest number of nominations): designing, deploying, and maintaining the technology systems that the business depends on to succeed.

The TLAs have no set number of winners, nor need there be winners in each category. We’re looking for the best, period. (For details on the criteria and how to enter for 2012, go to the InfoWorld Technology Leadership Awards page.)

And we’ve found it, as the 2011 Technology Leadership Awards winners show. We present them in alphabetical order within each category:

TLA Business Leadership

• Kamel Shaath, KOM Networks

TLA Inside IT Leaderhip

• Dan Lohrmann, State of Michigan
• Frank Smith, Booz Allen Hamilton

TLA Technology Innovation

• Carl Eberling, Quest Software
• Mizan Rahman, M2Sys Technologies
• Renaat Ver Eecke, Navman Wireless

TLA Technology Deployment

• Matt Larson, Verisign
• Chris Perretta, State Street Bank
• Mohammad Rifaie, Royal Bank of Canada
• Shawn Spott, RBC Wealth Management

2011 InfoWorld Technology Leadership Awards:

Business Leadership winners

Given its requirements that technologists step out of IT and squarely into the business, this is one of the most challenging categories for which to find nominees. But we expect nominations to grow as more IT people cross the IT/business alignment divide, and as IT and business alike come to realize there should be no divide at all.

Kamel Shaath, CTO, KOM Networks: Shaath’s company is in the business of selling storage appliances and services, and to help KOM stand out and do good at the same time, Shaath instigated a partnership with recycler TCG and the Feed the Children charity to take customers’ old servers, wipe them, recycle them via TCG, and donate the proceeds to Feed the Children. The technology component is a natural outgrowth of what KOM already does, though it added a logistical layer to its work process. “IT is not just writing a check. It’s a program that takes a great deal of effort from numerous sources,” Shaath says.

But this effort was about business leadership beyond the confines of the IT role, and Shaath found a way to leverage his business operations to help clients by reducing disposal costs, stand out from competitors, and help a charity hurt by the recent recession by converting discards into donations.

2011 InfoWorld Technology Leadership Awards:

Inside IT Leadership winners

Like any business unit, IT can get set in its ways, becoming just a deployment and operations shop. This year’s winners broke out of this rut in big ways, taking aggressive, innovative approaches to getting IT done.

Dan Lohrmann, CTO, State of Michigan: Michigan has been hit particularly hard by the recession, leading to drastic reductions in state expenditures in numerous government areas, including IT staff, IT salaries, and product and services budgets. Lohrmann took the tough reality and tried to make lemonade out lemons by using the cuts as the catalyst to reinvent how IT did its work — no easy feat in government.

There was no magic bullet; Lohrmann and his team had to look at everything, from how support calls were handled to how a private cloud project could increase computing capacity while lowering operational costs — and then do something about it. The challenge Lohrmann faced is not unique among government IT leaders, but the aggressive response across a wide number of areas is exceptional.

Frank Smith, CIO, Booz Allen Hamilton: With his firm’s century of experience in management and, later, technology consulting, you can imagine the irony when Smith told the firm that it needed to look for outside expertise and fresh insight to rework its financial reporting systems in preparation for its 2010 IPO. Smith hired the reporting team from outside Booz Allen’s staff — as an added advantage, the team had no a priori alliance to any department, including IT, in its decisions on what to do — plus brought in an outside consultant for the infrastructure design.

The result was very positive: Not only was the firm able to produce the financial statements required by the government — which the company had never had to do before as a private concern — but its operations became less expensive due to the new reporting system, increasing Booz Allen’s profits. Sometimes, you have to know your own limits to escape them.

2011 InfoWorld Technology Leadership Awards:

Technology Innovation winners

Technology vendors do this all the time: create and enhance technologies, then package them in a way that makes them appealing to customers. So what distinguishes our Technology Innovation awards from the innovation-as-usual pattern of the technology world? Simply, a leader thinking beyond the obvious hot areas or the tried-and-true to find a new territory to steer their company’s technological vision — the kind of thinking we all associate with a company like Apple.

Carl Eberling, general manager of virtualization and monitoring, Quest Software: Living in a cave for the past decade might be the only excuse for not knowing that virtualization is hot. Virtualization of one sort or another is now a routine part of most technology service providers’ offerings. What sets Eberling apart is his view of virtualization not as a technology choice to be made in deciding what IT services his firm should offer its clients. Instead, Eberling saw virtualization as a method that was appropriate in some circumstances but not in others. He also decided not to bet on any specific virtualization technology.

That set the stage for Quest to avoid the “I have a hammer, so every problem is a nail” trap many technologists fall into. Instead, Quest focused on acquiring a range of technologies and put together a portfolio that is flexible — a type of innovation that occurs at the contextual level, one often missed by nuts-and-bolts engineers. You can think of it as metatechnology innovation.

Mizan Rahman, CTO, M2Sys Technologies: It seems obvious in retrospect, but only because someone put the pieces together — in this case, a variety of biometric sensors, such as for fingerprint and iris scanning. What in retrospect seems obvious is that no one technology is perfect in all cases or appropriate for all populations. Rahman saw that and came up with a multimodal approach to biometrics in which sensors could be switched from one form of scanning to another as needed. Even better, he put together an SDK based on existing hardware so that manufacturers and developers can try out the concept for themselves. The technology is new and unproven, and M2Sys’s success is far from assured, but Rahman deserves credit for seeing the bigger picture, then finding a way to give it life.

Renaat Ver Eecke, North American general manager, Navman Wireless: GPS systems are another one of those “it’s everywhere, so what else is there to do?” technologies. But Ver Eecke realized that one use segment remained unaddressed: tracking construction equipment, whose noisy, high-vibration environments (and easy access to the equipment by thieves who would strip off such gear) chewed through standard GPS devices. And the typical navigation software didn’t account for many peculiarities of construction environments, such as the fact that the construction vehicles were as likely to be off road as on posed a challenge for the mapping systems; the fact that equipment might not be turned on when in motion (such as when being hauled from one site to another — or stolen by thieves via flatbed trucks); the fact that equipment status was important (such as idling time) to better manage costs and resources; and the fact that those monitoring equipment needed to know the type of equipment they were seeing in the inevitable collection of dots all in the same job site.

The effort led by Ver Eecke was a classic case of extending a technology beyond its original purpose, figuring out the new issues and addressing them before a product ever shipped. That’s the kind of technology innovation that builds new business, as Navman Wireless has happily discovered.

2011 InfoWorld Technology Leadership Awards:

Technology Deployment winners

For most technology leaders, the scope of their work is in putting technology in the field to solve business needs — in other words, deployment. It’s the bread and butter of IT. But as common as deployment challenges are, some are simply in their own class due to complexity, scope, politics, and the like. The winners in this category exemplify those in-their-own league efforts.

Matt Larson, VP of DNS research, Verisign: The security flaws in the Domain Name System that DNSSec is meant to fix have been known for a few years, but the Internet is such a large, sprawling, loosely managed network that implementing the solution is no simple task. And that far-from-simple task has been on the shoulders of Larson, who has implemented the DNSSec retrofit to the zones most essential to the functioning of the global Internet: .com, .edu, .net, .gov, and the root zone itself. The effort took several years, with the .com sign-off occurring just this March. We all thank you.

Chris Perretta, CIO, State Street Corp.: State Street has seen its business grow dramatically in Europe, so much so that it needed to add two data centers with all the high-speed connections, disaster recovery, green creds, and high-speed information systems you’d expect of any major financial services firm.

But State Street’s deployment challenge was greater than that. Following the vision of the company’s executive vice president, Perretta took the opportunity to consolidate all the in-site technology systems — a mishmash of systems from multiple acquisitions — into six regional systems, moving thousands of people and the systems they depended on in a complex rollout far beyond the scale of anything the 300 IT staff that State Street assigned to the project had ever experienced. (The financial services firm brought in 300 technologists to design the new systems architecture, deploy it, and manage the transition.) At the same time, the new information infrastructure was supporting 14 additional locations.

Mohammad Rifaie, VP of enterprise information management, Royal Bank of Canada: The new frontier in business intelligence is not mining the data whose meaning you already know in well-ordered data warehouses but in gleaning actionable insight from the “random information” you get from customers in various online channels. This is old news to banks, but the twist here is that Rifaie’s team used a combination of big data and semantics analysis tools to take analytics to a new level in service of business growth, rather than continue down the traditional BI path. That meant rethinking BI and the resources — people and technology — needed to support the “random information” opportunity.

The system put in place analyzes customer interactions (via email, interactive voice systems, and the like) — their queries and the dialogs that ensued — to identify customer irritants the automated systems were not addressing, to better understand trigger events for marketing campaigns, and to surface both problem and opportunity areas that bank managers could focus on to attract and retain more customers. In the process, Royal Bank decreased its need for traditional analysts, as more rank-and-file employees can use the system directly, while broadening its analysis of customer interactions from a minute percentage to nearly all.

Shawn Spott, manager of corporate intelligence and research, RBC Wealth Management: The brokerage firms’ executives wanted more insight into their financial operations — sales and market performance, mainly — but Spott wasn’t sure how to provide it. From his 15 years in BI, he had learned the more data you gave people, the more overwhelmed they got and the less effective it became. Plus, none of the tools he examined claiming to be user-friendly delivered on that promise.

Rather than buy Brand X’s whizbang analysis and reporting tool and calling it a day, Spott spent a couple years trying to figure out how to deal with the contradiction between needing to present the key information simply while handling the diversity of information needs that executives had. He spent 18 months alone on figuring out the right presentation layer to address those conflicting goals. Then he did buy a tool — to rapidly develop his own analytics and reporting front end. With the information architecture, presentation layer, and user information segmentation all in place, he was able to use the Tableau tool to create the reports that executives needed, in a mass-customization approach to software delivery.

That’s a very different approach than the typical plan of providing a broad framework for multiple user groups with filters that users then have to figure out to get what they really want. Ironically, it takes Spott’s team less effort to support his mass-customization model than the traditional methods. That’s because the front end leaves it to users to select their data sources; it handles the integration based on rules that Spott’s team derived from all the custom research and reports they used to do — integration that his group once did manually. Spott now finds he’s serving more executives more data than ever before — but with no firehose effect on users or report-generation treadmill for his staff.

This story, “The InfoWorld 2011 Technology Leadership Awards,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.