UK IT Industry Awards 2011: And the winners are...

Infrastructure Innovation of the Year

Winner: Alquist Consulting

Celsius from Alquist Consulting is a high-definition energy monitoring technology for the datacentre that uses fibre-optic cable as a high-resolution temperature sensor. Datacentres are using Celsius to reduce their annual energy consumption by about 25 per cent.

Medallists: Veeam Software; Virtual Instruments

Andrew Jones from Alquist is presented with the Infrastructure Innovation award

UK Innovation and Entrepreneurship Award

Winner: Shutl

Shutl is a new, UK-based delivery service that enables retailers to offer two delivery propositions to their customers: immediate delivery within as little as 90 minutes or delivery within a one-hour window of the customer’s choosing. Shutl makes this possible by operating a platform that aggregates capacity within the same-day courier market and exposes this capacity to retailers via a web service.

Medallists: Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation; Functional Technologies

INDIVIDUAL EXCELLENCE AWARDS

CIO of the Year

Winner: Rob Fraser, IT director, Sainsbury’s

Rob Fraser became the IT director at Sainsbury’s in August 2009. His remit was to transform the internal IT capability following an unsuccessful outsourced operating model. Since then, Rob has transformed the IT division that is now achieving the highest levels of operational service, efficiency savings and delivering a significant capital programme of IT-led business change.

Medallists: Phil Pavitt, CIO and director general for change, HM Revenue & Customs; Keith Woolley, director of technology services, Home Group

Rob Fraser of Sainsbury's is named CIO of the Year

Young IT Professional of the Year

Winner: Nicola Cooper, senior consultant, IBM

Nicola has been engaged as a senior business consultant across a variety of sectors, and has managed global, multi-vendor design, build and testing teams in her six years with IBM. Most recently, she was the test consultant for the largest implementation in the history of Shell’s Downstream-One Aviation Programme, managing nine test phases for 29 IT systems concurrently.

Medallists: Andy Birds, service design & transition manager, The Co-operative Banking Group; Vidhyalakshmi Karthikeyan, graduate researcher, BT

IT Manager of the Year

Winner: Steve Collins, Investigation and Threat Management, National Grid

Steve is a senior information security professional at National Grid. Over the past year he has worked on creating and recruiting a new team focusing on investigation and threat management. He has set vision and direction for the team and deployed immediate tactical initiatives and strategic recommendations designed to create a world-class function within National Grid and immediately solve threat exposures.

Medallists: Paul Webster, IT manager, Lloyds Banking Group; Dave Westwood, IS strategy consultant, National Grid

Systems Professional of the Year

Winner: David Newman, channel platform manager, Best Buy Europe/The Carphone Warehouse

David has more than 14 years of IT solutions/project management, systems development, business and change analysis experience. He has an extensive skill set in operational IT, software development, infrastructure rollout, change and process management based projects, especially those that involve new technology, software introduction or re-engineering.

Medallist: Peter Bellinger, IT architect, IBM UK

Service & Support Professional of the Year

Winner: Sheila Hardwicke, head of Service Centre, Network Rail

Sheila is a highly motivating operational manager with more than 18 years’ experience managing service recovery and improvement programmes across the UK and Europe. Driven by results and able to achieve significant service improvements, team re-motivation and cost reduction, Sheila has experience in both internal support functions and as a commercial service provider. Her approach to people management is fair and straight-forward, enabling her to bring enthusiastic teams with her when delivering the service recovery for which she is now recognised.

Medallists: Chris Holmes, IT infrastructure change and deployment manager, McDonald’s; Michelle Major-Goldsmith, head of service management training, Sysop

Business Analyst of the Year

Winner: Andrew J Perkins, senior business analyst, Post Office

Andrew delivered a IT programme of “transaction re-engineering” across 12,500 branches. He led the requirements and design definition of a replacement flow by using innovative methods of requirements elicitation using social media, resulting in a £5.7m benefit, removing 670,000 counter hours and allowing the delivery of enhanced training and a corresponding increase in customer and user satisfaction.

Medallists: Julian Dyer,  business analyst, National Grid; Paul Mercer, senior business design analyst, Barclaycard

Special Commendation: Dr Yang Li, principal scientist, BT