What lies beneath the tip of the iceberg that is the line-up of finalists on stage at the IITPSA President's Awards? Those moments in the spotlight are the culmination of months of behind-the-scenes activity that unfailingly bring forward worthy winners of the awards.
The process starts months earlier, with a refreshed agreement between IITPSA and its partners at ITWeb and EngineerIT that they will continue the partnership that has been so successful. The timetable is laid out, the previous and new judges are contacted and the first invitation to the community to nominate candidates for the awards goes out. These invitations are circulated by the Institute and its media partners, as well as being sent to other stakeholder bodies, and are repeated at intervals to remind the community of the opportunity to nominate.
The judging panel includes the President, CEO and a Vice President of the IITPSA, the Editorial Director of ITWeb, the Editor of Brainstorm, representatives of Gartner and the Gordon Institute of Business Science and, if possible, the winners of the previous Awards.
Any person can nominate any candidate. They are asked to identify which category they are entering and to provide a motivation by supplying details of the nominee's work and other accomplishments, including contributions to social responsibility projects, and any other information that can support the nomination. Nominations are entered on-line through the ITWeb Web site. When the nomination period closes, the entries received are validated for suitability (you may be the greatest exponent of the art of bonsai but your green fingers won't get you into the IITPSA's good books) and are then sent out to the judges, who have to select their top ten nominees in each category. This is carried out by successive rounds of voting - usually, two is enough.
The top ten names in each category are then re-published on the ITWeb website and the community is asked to vote for their top five. At the conclusion of this round of public voting, the judges meet to assess each nominee in each category, together with the preferences shown by the public votes, and the two lists are narrowed down to the five finalists in each group.
Then comes the "herding cats" challenge for the organisers - setting up interview sessions for each of the finalists to meet with the panel of judges, which requires coordination the diaries of 10 people for each of 10 sessions! Somehow, this miracle of logistics is achieved each year in the space of a week.
The interviews themselves are the most interesting and often the most surprising part of the judges' responsibilities. Sometimes they are faced with a well-known figure who turns out to be quite different from their public persona. Sometimes they meet someone not generally recognised but who has achieved amazing outcomes during their career. Nearly always (make that always), the judges are reassured that every candidate deserves to be a finalist.
How to decide the winners? Of course, the judges have the criteria for each category by which to measure the nominees, and the interviews give them further insight into the characteristics and experience of the finalists. Do all the judges agree on who should be the winners? Not necessarily, at least not at first pass. Do all the judges agree on the winners by consensus? Yes. Does consensus involve violent protest? I leave that to your imagination... Suffice it to say that the judges keep coming back for more.
This article was written by Adrian Schofield, a Vice-President of IITPSA (Institute of Information Technology Professionals South Africa).
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