= The ITWeb business intelligence (BI) award winners for 2012 were the Foschini group and Santam, walking away with the BI Excellence award and BI Innovation award, respectively.
The BI Excellence award recognises a project that serves as an example of excellent best practices and technical expertise used to deliver measurable business benefits. The finalists in the category were AccTech Systems and Foschini. The Foschini group's project focused on BI for HR, and judges said it demonstrated good attention to overall architecture and that it was well executed.
Jacqui Cameron from the Foschini group said it was an honour for her to receive this award on behalf of the Foschini group and that there was a large amount of collaboration in preparing to get the BI for HR solution up and running.
The judges for the awards this year were Ranka Jovanovic, editorial director at ITWeb; Dr Barry Devlin, founder and principal of 9sight Consulting; and Bill Hoggarth, divisional director at CQS Performance Solutions.
Devlin said Foschini's project was a classic data warehouse project, with good attention to overall architecture, ETL and a well-executed plan to deliver a quick win to senior management.
The BI Innovation award honours the project with the most innovative use of BI tools and techniques that delivers measurable business benefits, this is a new category introduced to the awards. The BI Innovation award finalists for this year were saidWot and Santam. Judges explained that saidWot's project demonstrated the use of multi-structured social media, while Santam's aimed at data mining focusing on business benefits.
Commenting on Santam's project, Devlin said this was a strategically aimed data mining/analytics project that paid close attention to business benefits. He added that it demonstrated excellent application of operational analytics and linked to longer-term BI.
Neels Maritz accepted the award on behalf of Santam, and said the reason the project came about at the organisation was because it needed to extract insight from its data, as the data was available, but the information from it was not being used.
Devlin noted that the two aspects he took into consideration when judging this year's awards were a good story and the technical quality of the project's approach. This is the third year that the awards took place.
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