Finalists chosen for CIO of the Year

After an exhausting judging session lasting from early yesterday morning to late into the evening, iTnews is excited to announce the 15 finalists from whom our readers will choose Australia’s CIO of the Year.

The iTnews Benchmark Awards attempted to set a new standard for recognising technology excellence and the quality of submissions we received exceeded our expectations.

Head over to our Awards page for a summary of the finalists' projects.

In early January, we’ll be opening up voting to our CIO-only LinkedIn Group to add their votes to the judges’ scores.

The finalists are:

FINANCE SECTOR CIO OF THE YEAR:

• Michael Harte, CIO and Group Technology Executive, Commonwealth Bank 
  Project: Core banking modernisation
• David Gee, CIO, Credit Union Australia
  Project: IT Transformation Program
• Andrew Henderson, CIO, ING Direct
  Project: Bank in a Box

GOVERNMENT CIO OF THE YEAR

• Susan Monkley, Group Manager, Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations
  Project: The Whole of Government Parliamentary Workflow Solution (PWS).
• Greg Farr, Group CIO, Department of Defence
  Project: Defence Data Centre Migration Project
• David Kennedy, CIO, NSW Department of Trade and Investment
  Project: Consolidation of multiple ERP systems into a single cloud-hosted system.

INDUSTRIAL CIO OF THE YEAR

• Jason Cowie, CIO, Calibre Global
  Project: R4 Project (Review, Rate, Revise, Refresh)
• Vito Forte, CIO, Fortescue Metals
  Project: New World of Work
• Gavin Bills, GM Technology, Pacific Aluminium
  Project: IT separation project - service desk

RETAIL CIO OF THE YEAR

• Wayne McMahon, CIO, Domino's Pizza Enterprise
  Project: Digital solution migration into Telstra cloud
• Henry Shiner, CIO, McDonald's Australia 
  Project: ANZ Employee Engagement Strategy
• Paul Keen, GM of technology, RedBalloon 
  Project: Amazon Web Services (AWS) Migration

UTIILITIES CIO OF THE YEAR

• John Lindsay, CTO, Internode (now CTO, iiNet)
  Project: Internode's IPv6 project.
• Cameron Dorse, CIO, Jemena
  Project: Electricity Outlook portal
• Leigh Berrell, CIO, Yarra Valley Water
  Project: Transforming IT through insourcing

It was incredibly difficult to whittle the group down to 15 – a great many commendable projects didn’t make the cut. To ensure transparency, we’ve captured the judging process on video – you’ll soon see bleary-eyed judges Brett Winterford, Liz Tay and Brad Howarth discussing the 15 finalists in a series of ‘Judging Notes’ videos published on iTnews.

We’d also like to hear your views on the projects on Twitter using the #BenchmarkAwards hashtag, or in our comments stream below.

Stay tuned for plenty more case studies and we hope to see you at the Awards night at the Gala Dinner of the CIO Strategy Summit at Melbourne’s Grand Hyatt on February 26, 2013.