BI excellence, innovation award finalists announced

Foschini and AccTech are the finalists for the annual ITWeb BI Excellence Award, while saidWOT and Santam are in line to win the BI Innovation Award for 2012.

Winners in both categories will be announced at the ITWeb Business Intelligence Summit next week, on 28 February 2012.

The awards, now in the third year, recognise the best and most innovative BI projects in South Africa - implementations that have delivered exceptional business value, made a significant strategic difference, or incorporated out-of-the-box thinking.

Dr Barry Devlin, founder and principal of 9sight Consulting, is one of the judges of this year's awards. He says there are two aspects to a BI project that he looks out for - a good story and the technical quality of the project's approach.

Engen was the winning entrant in the 2010 BI Excellence Awards. Its project portfolio management BI strategy was deployed across its distribution network in sub-Saharan Africa. The project improved Engen's business planning process around prioritising projects.

The South African Revenue Service (SARS), the runner-up in 2010, was crowned overall winner during the ITWeb Business Intelligence Summit and Awards 2011. Its enterprise data warehouse and BI capabilities improved cost savings and return on investment, while helping to speed up taxpayer services, as well as enforcement, risk and strategic services.

“BI projects in large organisations are often complex, simply because large organisations are complex and typically have many disparate data stores that have to be integrated into a data warehouse.

“In that case, technical quality is seen in the elegance of the solution, that simply works in the face of the complexity. In smaller organisations or limited-scope projects, I look for innovation, either in the technology used or the process of implementation, and sometimes both.”

Devlin is joined on the judging panel by Ranka Jovanovic, ITWeb's editorial director, and Bill Hoggarth, head of BI at CQS Technology Holdings.

For more information about the ITWeb BI Excellence and Innovation Awards, click here.