In-Depth

2006 Innovators: Who should win?

• By Michael Alexander
• March 28, 2006

Ever wondered exactly how other IT teams handle seemingly insurmountable app dev tasks? Projects like merging nearly 100 paper-based and otherwise incompatible systems across a state on an aggressive timetable with a limited budget.

Chances are you’ve faced challenges that required innovation, creative use of resources and a little luck to reach the finish line with management still on-board. You’re not alone. ADT readers often come up with innovative solutions to complex business problems. We wanted to find out what they were doing and why.

Thirty of these innovative projects are nominated for ADT's 12th annual Innovator Awards, which recognize development teams who have deployed unique and compelling solutions in data warehousing, application engineering and other categories.

This year’s Innovator Award winners were chosen by Keane, an outside consulting firm. The results will be announced in the May issue of ADT, which will be in your hands at the end of April. In the meantime, ADTmag.com will post all the nominees in each of five categories once a week for the next five weeks, beginning today with application engineering.

Go behind the scenes with each nominee and see the project’s objectives and methodology, as well as its manpower, technology and other resource needs.

You’ll also be able to read the nominee’s complete application—the same information Keane used to choose the winners. The judges supplemented these applications with their own research, but you’ll get a close look at the process—close enough, in fact, that we’re asking you to predict who you think the winners will be in each category.