Eurostar and Liverpool hospital scoop top prizes
Star quality all round at Techworld awards
By Techworld staff | Published: 07:30, 12 June 2008
A pioneering approach to women’s health, a high-speed train service and a major upgrade of a telecommunications system were among the winners of this year's Techworld awards.
Dr Zafar Chaudry of the Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust scooped the CIO of the Year; the IT department at Eurostar, responsible for the Eurostar 1 project were adjudged the IT Department of the Year and the BT 21st Century Network was selected as Green Project of the Year.
The Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust had a particularly strong showing: it narrowly missed out on two other awards. The judges singled out the work that the trust had done in installing a Wi-Fi-based system within a tight timeframe to improve patient care, deliver speedy response for clinical data and cut operating costs considerably. Dr Chaudry, ran a small team of three people, yet delivered a major project on time and on budget to the considerable benefit of Liverpool patients.
The IT department of Eurostar had to work on a larger project in fact and the largest construction project in UK history. The Eurostar Information Systems (IS) department had to handle the underlying IT infrastructure involving a migration of the head office from Waterloo to St Pancras; the design of four new computer rooms; the implementation of four new MPLS wide area network links and development of new departure boards and ticketing systems.
Other winners were Befordshire Police and Research in Motion for a project that provided the police force with Blackberrys to cut down on police station paperwork and T-Mobile and ALPS for a project to aid distance learning. BT Operate won the award for the best green project for its 21st century network upgrade
. This involved a major consolidation of data centres in a drive to reduce the company's carbon footprint The consolidation reduced the company's total electricity bill by 1 percent, no mean undertaking as BT is responsible for 0.8 percent of the total UK, electricity consumption.
.p> The winners, who were announced last night at a gala dinner held at The O2, were all singled out by the judges for their endeavours in a particularly high-quality batch of entrants.
Maxwell Cooter, editor of Techworld and chairman of the judging panel said “This was the best selection of entries for many years: there was a great mix of projects – from single building upgrades to muti-million pound nationwide efforts but the common theme was that all the participating organisations had thought about how to harness technology to achieve a business aim.”
Watch videos of Zafar Chaudry of Liverpool Women's NHS Foundation Trust and Tony Longhurst of Eurostar here
