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Editorial: ADT Innovator Awards, Take 10

• By Michael W. Bucken
• April 1, 2004

Welcome to Application Development Trends' 10th annual Innovator Awards issue, which celebrates IT organizations that have undertaken risky development efforts in an effort to improve business. Our mission at ADT has long been to help you, our readers, keep up with tools and technology trends throughout the application life cycle -- from methodology, design and development to deployment and management. And the best way to do that is to profile the innovative work of your colleagues in IT organizations around the world. That is what this special issue is all about.

Though the economy has improved in many ways since the 2003 competition, this year's winners once again deserve special plaudits for undertaking risks during a mostly risk-averse period for IT groups. Spending for development technologies remains far below the levels of the late 1990s as firms try to keep costs down by making due with what they have.

The IT organizations profiled showed a willingness to spend what was needed to get an edge on the competition and, in many cases, to offer better products and services to clients. This year's winning organizations were able to utilize new technologies like Web services and Service-Oriented Architectures to complete significant work for lower costs and effort than in past years. We also found that improved tools are allowing business analysts to do work that only hard-core developers would do in the past.

Each of the 65 or so entries underwent close inspection by our team of editors at ADT and a hard-working team of consultants at Keane Inc., a well-regarded Boston-based IT consulting and outsourcing firm. The judges presented Innovator Awards in seven categories -- Processes & Practices, Tools & Technologies, E-Business Application Development, Middleware and Application Integration, Web Services, Data Warehousing/Business Intelligence, and Application Management and Deployment. Thanks to all the organizations that took the time to fill out an extensive application form to let us know about the state of IT.

I'd like to express thanks to the Keane team of judges led by Danny Suppin that included Tom Mowbray, Judy Meadows, Elizabeth Livingston, Bryan Gilbert, Karl Garrison and Jack Fuchs. And another thank you to the ADT team of writers, judges and editors that includes Jack Vaughan, John K. Waters, Rich Seeley, Peter Bochner, Lana Gates, Maggie Madden McClennan and Kim Hefner, and designers Scott Rovin, Steven Anderson and Graye Smith.