This is the shortlist for the Innovative Project of the Year at the Computing Awards for Excellence 2006. For more details visit www.computing.co.uk/awards.
Army on Everest
An Army marketing campaign using cutting-edge web technologies such as mobile video feeds, podcasts and Google Earth has become the benchmark for how the organisation will communicate with potential recruits and the public in future.
The Army on Everest site, which went live on 7 April just four months after conception, generated more than one million hits during the seven-week campaign and significantly boosted the number of potential recruits.
It was designed as a live event site to follow three Army expedition teams in the Himalaya, and the climbers sent back daily video and audio feeds, blogs and team positions via mobile satellite technology.
The campaign created more than 100 live expedition podcasts for each team, and the public could also download video clips to their mobile phones and send them to others via Bluetooth. Other technologies used by the site included RSS feeds, Flash 8 games, interactive animations and email alerts.
Island and Portsmouth Health ICT Service
The Island and Portsmouth Health ICT Service (Iphis) claims to be the first organisation in the world to use data mining techniques on clinical data. Iphis used the technology to analyse two sets of data at one acute NHS hospital trust.
The organisation purchased Microsoft’s SQL Server for its relational database and data mining capabilities, but otherwise the project used existing hardware and resources. As a result, costs were kept to a minimum.
After a relatively short period of research and development, the Iphis team was able to perform analysis on the trust’s main patient administration system and a set of cancer data. The results revealed a number of unexpected relationships between specific data items that could help predict patterns of illness and lead to enhanced levels of treatment and care in future.
Iphis believes that the project demonstrates that the NHS can gain significantly enhanced knowledge for relatively little investment.
Southern Rail
In September 2005, Southern Rail became the first operator in the world to offer customers broadband internet access on trains. In partnership with service provider T-Mobile and technology supplier Nomad Digital, Southern launched a T-Mobile HotSpot service on its London to Brighton service.
Delivering a reliable, two-way broadband connection to a moving train is extremely challenging. Southern succeeded by building an 82km private WiMax network corridor along the length of the line, working with Nomad for many months to fine-tune the technology until it was able to deliver reliable 32Mbps connections in both directions.
The service has proved immensely popular, and commuters are increasingly staggering their journeys because they know they are able to work effectively on the train.
This has had the knock-on benefit of reducing crowding on trains at peak times, making journeys more pleasant and reducing the pressure on Southern’s infrastructure.
Marks & Spencer
Marks & Spencer has given staff the ability to count thousands of items of clothing in minutes rather than hours, with one of the world’s largest RFID tagging projects.
For the initial trial this year, the fruition of four years’ work, the retailer developed purpose-built hardware for 42 stores and nine distribution centres, designing and manufacturing 20 million intelligent RFID labels used to tag individual items of clothing.
Mobile, battery-powered scanners are used to perform stock checks quickly and easily, with information transmitted instantly to the central application.
The system has enabled M&S to improve the availability of merchandise in stores and eliminate many manual stock-taking operations, dramatically increasing levels of staff satisfaction, productivity and customer service.
M&S is planning to deploy RFID in more stores and use the technology to improve supply chain visibility.
Boots
The MyStoreNet project has given Boots the Chemist a way to deliver real-time operational and sales information to individual employees through an interactive web portal.
As each user in a store signs on, the portal determines their particular role and provides them with tailored content and appropriate levels of access to the company’s central systems.
For example, store managers will be given key day-to-day management information such as daily-updated sales figures, colleagues’ anniversaries and key company communications.
The portal also highlights sales opportunities to them by comparing the branch’s performance with a group of similar stores.
A pharmacist, on the other hand, would see key pharmaceutical information and urgent action messages.
The portal was built using IBM Websphere technology and takes data from Boots’ new SAP-based data warehouse. The service is delivered via a recently implemented wide area network to PCs and touch-screen tills in all stores.
BP
BP’s Location Aware Safety System (Lass) is the world’s first wireless system for capturing the real-time location of personnel on a ‘dense metal’ industrial sit e. The company says the system holds the potential to deliver many millions of pounds’ worth of labour cost savings every year, as well as dramatic improvements to safety and compliance levels.
Site workers wear RFID badges that broadcast their whereabouts to a network of wireless transmitters around the site. The software shows their location on an easy-to-read map of the site.
Lass provides an instant list of people in various areas, reducing rescue response time and eliminating unnecessary search sweeps in the event of an emergency.
The company overcame considerable technical and management hurdles before taking the system live at one refinery earlier this year.
It now plans a wider rollout, and to extend the technology to improve the efficiency of workers and track assets.
Further reading:
For more details, see www.computing.co.uk/awards.
Public Sector Project of the Year shortlist
Private Sector Project of the Year shortlist
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