Calibre's Cowie named Industrials CIO of the Year

Calibre Global's first ever chief information officer, Jason Cowie, has been named the Industrials CIO of 2012 for an organisational restructure that boosted end-user satisfaction from 32 to 94 percent.

Jason Cowie (centre) at the iTnews Benchmark Awards.

Cowie was recruited to the West Australian engineering firm in August 2011 to establish an enterprise IT culture and strategic vision, and restart a stalled enterprise resource planning (ERP) project.

In the 12 months to November 2012, Cowie issued all IT staff a new set of key performance indicators (KPI), service level agreement (SLA) targets and quality assurance (QA) targets.

Calibre lost a handful of IT staff during the restructure, dubbed Review, Rate, Revise, Refresh (R4) but information submitted to the inaugural iTnews Benchmark Awards highlighted significant service level improvements over the year.

Cowie's project was judged ahead of outstanding projects led by Fortescue Metals CIO Vito Forte and Pacific Aluminium GM Technology Gavin Bills by both an iTnews judging panel and a panel of their CIO peers.

Judges described the restructure as "a case study in why organisations must have a CIO function", noting that it prepared Calibre to tackle a new range of ambitious technology goals.

Cowie was awarded in front of an audience of about 120 Australian CIOs at the iTnews Benchmark Awards ceremony held at Melbourne's Grand Hyatt.

"Thanks to the team for all the hard work over the last 12 months, and to Calibre for giving me the autonony to make the changes I needed to make," Cowie said.

"And thanks to my wife who probably didn't see much of me."