ITAC Welcomes Nominations for 2014 Ingenious Awards Program

OTTAWA, May 6, 2014 /CNW/ - ITAC, the Information Technology Association of Canada, announced that nominations are now open for the 2014 Ingenious Awards Program. Entering its third year, the program honours excellence in the innovative use of information and communications technology (ICT) to achieve greater productivity efficiency or other enterprise goals. Awards are given in five categories: large private enterprise, large public organization, small- or medium-sized private enterprise, small- or medium-sized public organization, and not-for-profit organization.

"The Ingenious Awards Program is the cornerstone in ITAC's communications advocacy for more robust adoption of ICT across the whole Canadian economy," said ITAC President and CEO Karna Gupta. "By identifying and showcasing excellence in the use of technology to achieve outstanding, quantifiable business results, we present a forum for peer-to-peer education and inspiration among large-, medium- and small-sized organizations in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors."

The 2013 Ingenious Award winners represented a broad cross-section of examples of excellence in the use of technology. The winners were:

Not-For-Profit: The University of Ontario Institute of Technology, whose Artemis project applies a 'big data' approach to analyzing the progress of premature infants.

Small/Medium Public: Municipal Property Assessment Corporation, which used open source and cloud-based technologies to streamline the way it does property assessments.

Small/Medium Private: GrowSafe Systems, which is applying data-mining techniques to measure individual animal information for the cattle industry.

Large Public: Public Works and Government Services Canada, whose Transformation of Pension Administration project is delivering on its promise to improve efficiency in government services and reduce costs to taxpayers.

Large Private: Dundee Precious Metals, which adapted several existing technologies for use far beneath the Earth's surface in Europe's largest gold mine, and realized spectacular improvements in efficiency.

Nominations are open until June 30 for organizations that completed projects making innovative use of ICT in the past two years. The awards will be presented at the Ingenious Awards Gala on November 12 at the Four Seasons Hotel, 60 Yorkville Avenue, Toronto. All nominations undergo a rigorous two-tier judging process. A team of ICT executives from the CIO Association of Canada oversees initial judging, with final judging conducted by five senior CIOs and CEOs.

"In addition to recognizing outstanding achievement in the use of technology, our goal is to inspire organizations to apply ICT more creatively, which will lead to a more productive and innovative Canadian economy," said Gupta.

To be eligible for nomination, organizations must be Canadian and the project must have taken place in Canada and have been completed no earlier than June 2012. Full contest rules and nomination forms can be found at IngeniousAwards.ca.

About ITAC:
The Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC) is the voice of the Canadian information and communications technologies (ICT) industry. ITAC represents a diverse ICT community spanning telecommunications and internet services, ICT consulting services, hardware, microelectronics, software and electronic content. ITAC's community of companies accounts for more than 70 per cent of the 572,700 jobs, $155.3 billion in revenue, $6.2 billion in R&D investment, $30.4 billion in exports and $11 billion in capital expenditures that the ICT industry contributes annually to the Canadian economy. The ICT sector currently represents 4.9 per cent of Canada's gross domestic product (GDP) and accounted for 9.4 per cent of all real GDP growth since 2002. ITAC is a prominent advocate for the expansion of Canada's innovative capacity and for stronger productivity across all sectors through the strategic use of technology.

SOURCE: Information Technology Association of Canada

Lynda Leonard, Senior Vice President, ITAC, [phone] ext. 2239, [email protected]