Innovation is one of the most important themes of the UK IT Industry Awards, so it is fitting that the Innovative Project of the Year award, sponsored by Konica Minolta, has turned out to be one of the most hotly contested.

This year’s finalists prove that IT innovation remains central to those organisations whose success relies on technology.

The winners will be announced at the prizegiving party, to be held at Battersea Evolution in London on Thursday 12 November 2009.

To view the full list of finalists for each award, and to book your table at what will be the biggest night of the UK IT calendar, visit our web site at www.computing.co.uk/awards.

Flintshire County Council ­- Virtualisation
Flintshire County Council has built a virtualised, twin-centre IT infrastructure, that uses the minimum possible hardware resources to provide the right level of support to the council’s business systems at any given time. When workload grows or new requirements emerge, Flintshire can expand existing virtual servers or fire up new ones. The automatic shutdown of unused resources, combined with innovative datacentre cooling methods, has reduced energy costs and carbon emissions.

National Grid -­ Planning for Success
National Grid has an aggressive programme to upgrade Britain’s power network, and has designed pioneering software, unavailable on the market, to improve long-term planning of work on the electricity transmission system. “Optimiser” will allow delivery of increased volumes of work with the same resources and reduce contractor costs associated with delays by at least 10 per cent by managing complex data and business processes through a single software tool.

Glasgow School of Art Digital Design Studio ­- Venus: Virtual exploration of underwater sites
The Venus project aims to provide accurate 3D reconstructions of underwater archaeological sites, providing virtual access to sites that are otherwise out of reach to all but a few specially trained archaeologists. By recreating the sites as interactive computer-generated virtual environments, experts and the general public can study these important pieces of cultural heritage in a safe and cost-effective environment. For example, an underwater dive simulator provides the ability to dive down to accurate 3D simulations of deep sea underwater wrecks.

HR Wallingford -­ OpenWEB integrated environmental modelling
To understand how pressures such as climate change affect the environment requires modelling of not just physical, chemical and biological parameters, but how these parameters interact to affect the whole system. OpenWEB is an HR Wallingford initiative researching and implementing integrated computer modelling approaches with a community of users working together to make simulation of environmental systems a reality.

GHL Insurance Services/IT-Freedom -­ ICE Claims
In 2008, GHL Insurance Services decided to radically improve its claims service and searched the market for solutions to automate manual processes and drive cost out of the business. In August 2008, a joint project team was set the objective of installing ICE Claims to help the firm to realise the benefits from January 2009.

BT Innovate & Design ­- Risky Starts
Risky Starts is a co-operative effort between Openreach, BT’s communication provider customers, and BT Innovate & Design. The problem involved the re-use of previously connected lines that are at risk of early life failure (ELF). The solution was to identify lines with a high risk of failing and ensuring any necessary engineering work was completed prior to service being provided to those lines. The result was a reduction from 12 per cent to four per cent in the level of ELFs.

Mouchel Group ­- Maps@mouchel
Maps@mouchel is an innovative system that incorporates central data storage and management, harnesses the latest in web portal and geographic information systems, supports open standards for specialist users of geospatial technologies, and helps protect Mouchel from intellectual property infringement risks.

Teliris ­- Teliris 6G
Teliris developed its 6G telepresence platform to dramatically reduce bandwidth and related costs. The standards-based client-server software takes telepresence from the heavy, hardware-reliant, high-bandwidth systems typical of other vendors to a lightweight, agile solution that uses general-purpose networks.

Defra/IBM ­- Energy efficiency research project
IT could eliminate 15 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, but IT is itself a costly energy consumer. IBM worked with the government to study the energy efficiency of different IT environments. An innovative, structured approach was developed that enables IT departments and decision-makers to make more informed decisions and drive excess energy consumption out of distributed IT.

Siemens IT Solutions and Services -­ Media Community Cloud
This proof-of-concept project was built to demonstrate innovative use of cloud computing technology, enabling Siemens to deliver new services to its media sector customers. The project addressed the challenges that media firms face as their business models are disrupted by the advent of convergence and the digital age.