The 2020 iTnews Benchmark Awards are now closed. 

Discover the top IT projects of the last year, download your free copy here!

We received a deluge of entries this year, with our new categories covering Diversity and Sustainability proving especially popular.

Finalists were announced on January 13th, 2020. Special pre-event roundtable discussions were held where iTnews explored 2020's top technology trends.

To whet appetites for the awards, iTnews and KPMG created a series of articles exploring the challenges and imperatives of digital technology. That series, titled Digital & Disruption, can be read here.

The 2020 iTnews Benchmarks Awards took place on March 5th, 2020, at KPMG's offices in Sydney.

Finalists experienced all the tension and celebration of the night, as depicted in our video of last year's event below. Stay tuned for our video reel of the 2020 event, coming soon!

What are the awards?

The iTnews Benchmark Awards see large end-user organisations nominate their IT staff or project teams nominate their work, to showcase the ways they've innovated and added value.

This year, the awards offer three groups of awards.

The first group of awards are sectoral:

• Best Federal Government Project - Projects conducted by federal government departments or agencies that result in either internal efficiencies or improved citizen services.
• Best State Government Project - Projects conducted by state government departments or agencies that result in either internal efficiencies or improved citizen services.
• Best Local Government Project - Projects conducted by local governments that result in either internal efficiencies or improved citizen services.
• Best industrial and primary production project - Projects across all classes of industry – agriculture, resources, manufacturing – that demonstrably improve productivity or product delivery.
• Best education project - Projects conducted by or for educational institutions at all levels – childcare to University to adult education – that deliver either internal efficiency or better experiences and outcomes for students.
• Best health project - projects conducted by any organisation delivering health services that demonstrably improve staff productivity and/or service delivery to patients.
• Best mass-market project - This category is for projects that serve consumers, across retail, entertainment, transport or any other activities in which the end-user is a member of the public going about their daily lives! We suggest this category for companies focused on retail, media & entertainment, telecommunications services, tourism, transport and automotive. Projects should demonstrate improvements to  internal operations and/or result in improved products and/or service delivery to corporate or retail customers.
• Best finance industry project - Projects conducted by participants in the financial services industries that either improve internal operations or result in improved products and/or service delivery to corporate or retail customers.

Next come the technology awards:

• Best resilience project - Projects that demonstrably improve an organisation's ability to withstand service disruptions, cyber-attacks, to ensure that internal users and/or customers face lesser risk of frustration or data exposure.
• Best internet of things project - Projects that use connected devices to gather and analyse data, then improve operations and/or products and services.
• Best emerging technologies project - Celebrating work in AR/VR, AI, drones, and other leading-edge technologies beyond the IoT.

And finally, the technology & society awards:

• Best diversity project - This category celebrates:
  • Efforts to deliver products and services that are accessible to the maximum number of Australians, regardless of their ability
  • Efforts by IT teams to make their teams more diverse in terms of any or all of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, neurological ability, religious beliefs, political beliefs, or other ideologies;
• Best sustainability project - The sustainability category recognises projects that reduce resource consumption inside a business or in the wider community.
• Young Leader - This category celebrates a young IT leader – 35 years or younger – who has led significant change in an IT team.

Lastly, one project from among the category winners will be selected as AUSTRALIAN TECHNOLOGY PROJECT OF THE YEAR.

Who judges the Benchmark Awards?

Finalists in each category are chosen by iTnews’ award-winning editorial team and expert advisors. The Project of the Year is decided by a a panel of external judges, working with the iTnews team. We also seek external advice from technical specialists and global CIOs as part of the process. Event sponsors including KPMG have no involvement whatsoever in the judging process, soliciting entries or writing entries. Category finalists are revealed to sponsors before the event, but category winners are not known to anyone outside iTnews' publisher nextmedia, and judges, before the awards night.  

The finalists will be selected on the following criteria:

• The strength of the business case for the project.
• The project’s delivery – evidence of agility, creative applications of IT and competencies developed, whilst keeping within targeted scope, deadline and cost.
• Whether new ground was forged – in terms of innovation and new technologies or approaches, and how this risk was managed.
• Return on investment – anticipated or measured.

Awards gala dinner

Winners will be announced at a gala dinner to be attended by over 150 IT leaders in March 2020

Questions?

For questions or clarification, please contact the editorial team.

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