Published on the 30/11/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
The winners of the eighth CIO Awards were announced last week at a gala dinner at Sky City – just one of many ICT-stacked awards ceremonies scheduled this year…
Kevin Angland of IAG won the supreme CIO of the Year Award 2014, while Rod Drury was honoured for his outstanding contribution to technology in New Zealand. Amanda White of Marlborough Lines, Global Dairy Trade and The Mind Lab by Unitec were winners in the other three categories.
Meanwhile, at a separate awards ceremony held on the same night for the 2014 KiwiNet Research Commercialisation awards, Tait Communications’ and the University of Canterbury’s (UC) Wireless Network Partnership was named winner of the BNZ Supreme Award.
With technology a central pillar of business leading to an increasing number of tech successes on the world stage, there has been a proliferation of awards programmes and categories that recognise technological and ICT success in New Zealand.
Entries are now open for New Zealand’s Open Source Awards, Business Excellence Awards, International Business Awards, Innovators Awards and the newbies on the block, the inaugural Excellence in IT Awards and the Spatial Excellence Awards. All of them increasingly can be expected to feature technology companies as winners. A quick glance at the list of last year’s Innovators Awards finalists confirms just how well represented the technology and IT sector is amongst New Zealand’s top innovators. Kea New Zealand this month announced Claudia Batten, a digital entrepreneur and pioneer now based in the States, as its youngest ever Supreme Award winner at the World Class New Zealand Awards.
That information technology is reaching the Kiwi business awards stage is great news. The technology successes are exciting and may the poppies all grow taller. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the awards ceremonies. The format is suffering from fatigue as the same old dire formula is rolled out event after event. The CIO Awards last week were a case in point – despite the efforts of excellent compère Hilary Barry and a captivating live sand art display, the energy in the room was sapped by self-serving sponsors making the most of their investment and, in so doing dragging the atmosphere of the celebration down with them. With so much technology at our fingertips surely we can do better.
The organisers of the most recent arrival on the awards circuit, the inaugural Excellence in IT Awards, perhaps aware of the already-full awards rosta, have formed a collaboration of nine IT associations to participate in one awards programme. The collaborating associations are the Institute of IT Professionals, CITRENZ, NZRise, Internet NZ, the Project Management Institute of NZ, Health Informatics NZ, the Computer Science Association of NZ and two others yet to be announced.
According to IITP chief executive Paul Matthews the reason for the setting up a new awards programme is that existing programmes do an excellent job of recognising the companies and vendors that do great work, but not the people behind them: “the unsung heroes and champions of our sector”. Perhaps other awards bodies should take a leaf out of the Excellence in IT’s book and collaborate to consolidate the over-crowded awards landscape.
As serial awards recipient and the only black tie wearer in the room Rod Drury said after the CIO Awards event last week, just please at least have something interesting to say.
UPDATE:
The Excellence in IT Awards now has 10 Awards Partner organisations with the addition of the NZ Software Association, GOVIS and NZ Open Source Society.
The Open Source Awards run every second year, and the NZ Open Source Society will be collaborating on an Excellence in Open Source award, as part of the Excellence Awards, every other year.
The Internet Industry Awards are also collaborating with the Excellence Awards, and partnering on the Internet Entrepreneur of the Year (one of the Excellence Awards) rather than running as a separate event.
