Who will be iTnews' Industrial CIO of the year?

Sanjay Mehta – ConocoPhillips
Integrated Safe System of Work

As a general rule, the Australian mining and resources sector has struggled to get the OH&S balance right - too lax and accidents ensue, too rigid and productivity slows. The business case for ConocoPhillips' project was opportunistic - the CIO combined an operational imperative to meet a safety objective and leveraged this spend to build a system that achieves other goals - improved workflow and less reliance on paper-based processes. 

The judges noted:

The in-house integration of an SAP back-end, web front-end, barcode systems, electronic permit-holder cards, CAD system processing, geo-spatial mapping, document management and workflow systems is a considerable effort for this oil and gas firm. Its sponsors have sought a return on investment within three years, largely thanks to adoption of the technology within other global operations.

Rob Downing - Hanson
Admin Overload

Rob Downing and his team have attempted to align IT with the business by taking the senior-most members of IT on the road to visit distributed operations and survey them on their needs. In doing so, IT discovered both issues and technology use cases they could never have come across as a centralised service desk. Of the 965 observations of areas of improvement, 300 items have been earmarked for attention, which will make 2014 a very busy year for Hanson's IT shop.

The judges noted:

Industrial firms of this scale rarely see IT have any presence beyond head office. Rob Downing has attempted a huge culture change that aims to break the division between IT and operations. The submission points to the breakdown of comfort zones on both sides as a result of doing this – IT people being shoved into concrete quarries and seeing first hand how users operate day-to-day, while conversely users get to view IT as something other than a function squirrelled away in head office that is never seen or heard from.

Brian Adams - Worley Parsons
Global Transformation 

Brian Adams is ambitious. He has presided over the global rollout of Microsoft Lync and Sharepoint to 38,000 staff, potentially one of the largest deployments on the planet. This collaboration project forms the centrepiece of a global IT transformation that will also see 14 service desks consolidated, DR standardised across the globe, the outsourcing of non-core services and new networks and storage.

The judges noted:

This really is a project on an industrial scale. It consolidates five companies into a standard IT practice and impacts 40,000 people any time IT pushes through a change. Many of those users would be working in remote areas - arguably they would value collaboration tools far more than your average office worker.