London, ON - June 17th , 2010 – After a four month coast to coast search, The Quest for Canada’s Smartest IT announced the winners of Smartest and Greenest IT departments in Canada at a gala event in Toronto last night.
Info-Tech Research Group received over 70 nominations from companies across the country.
The winners are….
Canada’s Smartest IT for Business Enablement - Blue Mountain Resorts
Blue Mountain Resorts manages to maintain IT costs at less than 2.5% of the business’ overall operating budget while running some of the most advanced systems across the company. Their Business Intelligence implementation achieved a return on investment of 1800% based on their ability to gain and share insight into business and customer habits that influenced scheduling, buying and investment. Blue Mountain’s IT department has retained 100% of their employees since opening their doors.
Canada’s Smartest IT for Community Empowerment - Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board
Dufferin-Peel successfully supplies thousands of special needs students with assistive technology on a daily basis. This is no small feat as licenses for this specialized software at each computer workstation are simply not in an education budget. This IT department has leveraged the benefits of a server-based-computing strategy to deliver the much needed software to its special needs pupils through the use of application virtualization and active directory group memberships. Special needs students can now stream their specialized applications from any computer in the school ensuring the unique needs of each and every student are met.
Canada’s Greenest IT for Business Enablement - Earth Rangers
Earth Ranger’s IT department chose to virtualize instead of adding racks of servers to their data center. Because of this one decision, the organization has saved nearly 85% in energy costs. This translates to 100,000 kilowatt hours per year, drastically reducing the carbon dioxide output of the data center. Earth Rangers has not only “greened” their data center but they’ve also made “green IT” a core value for the entire organization.
Canada’s Greenest IT for Community Empowerment - Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO)
PEO created a “Green Team” led by an IT Manager and including the CEO as a team member to ensure that green initiatives would be incorporated broadly across the organization. Beyond the green IT initiatives they have put in place including virtualizing the data center and consolidating office tools such as printers, the team models and teaches principles of environmentally responsible behaviour to staff and their membership to create long-term impact. By involving staff, volunteers, vendors and the public in green initiatives, PEO acts as a catalyst so that the environmentally responsible behaviour that is modeled at work is likely to be taken into the community at large.
The Quest for Canada’s Smartest IT “Wow Award” - The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids)
The Hospital for Sick Children led the development and implementation of eCHN as a tool to help health care providers across the province quickly exchange medical information critical to children’s health. Currently eCHN extends across all regions of Ontario with 100 hospital sites, including six tertiary care centres, and captures the records of more than one million Ontario children and over five million patient visits annually. This technology is used daily as a tool to help save the lives of our children.
Applications from all across Canada were reviewed to select qualified finalists for the Smartest IT and/or Greenest IT in Canada. The criteria for selection was based on stories shared in each nomination about how they sustained innovation, provided solutions allowing for their organization to operate smarter or greener, and the factors that set their use of IT apart from the competition. A select group were chosen as finalists and an independent panel met to select The Smartest and Greenest IT winners.
About the Quest for Canada’s Smartest IT
The Quest for Canada’s Smartest IT is an annual campaign designed to engage, inform and advise Canadian mid-market organizations on becoming smarter in the deployment and use of technology to change the way we live. For more on the campaign visit http://www.smartest-it.ca.
About Info-Tech Research Group
With a paid membership of over 21,000 worldwide, Info-Tech Research Group (www.infotech.com) is a global leader in providing tactical, practical Information Technology research and analysis. Info-Tech has been addressing the needs of IT professionals for over 10 years, and is one of North America's fastest growing full-service IT analyst firms.
Media contact
Rachel Flewelling at rflewelling@infotech.com or 1-888-670-8889 ext. 3061