In-Depth

How to pick a winner

• By Michael Alexander
• April 25, 2006

If you’ve been reading about the profiles of this year’s nominees for ADT’s annual Innovator Awards, here’s what’s been going on behind the curtain.

The process for selecting the annual winners starts at least 7 months before the results appear in the magazine. We begin with a call for nominees in the fall, and we set the deadline for applications for mid-December.

The applications are extensive and require quite a bit of time to complete. Applicants are asked to detail the project’s short and long-term objectives, the business risks involved, how the project meets the requirements of their end users or customers, the tools and methodologies used for the project and much more.  

For the 2006 awards, we received 31 nominees in five categories: data warehousing, application engineering, middleware/application integration, e-business application development and open-source application deployment.

We sent the applications to Keane—the much-respected application and business process services firm in Boston—where a panel of about a dozen judges reviewed the applications, evaluated the projects and selected the winners.

The judges return the applications and their notes explaining their selections. If we have a tie in a category, as we did this year, we ask the judges to deliberate until they can agree on a single pick. The judging process takes about 3 months.

By the way, no one other than the judges at Keane is ever involved in selecting the winners. The editors of ADT do not have a say in the outcome.

Finally, we spend 2 to 3 months interviewing the winners for the magazine and ADTmag.com, working with photographers, laying out the issue and all the other stuff that goes into producing a magazine.

You can read all about the winners starting in the May issue of Application Development Trends, which will be in the mail late next week. We’ll post the magazine here a few days after it arrives in the hands of our subscribers.

If you’ve haven’t visited ADTmag.com lately, read the profiles of all the nominees and their applications in which they describe their projects. Then, see if you agree with the judges’ picks.