We’ve singled out 20 InformationWeek Elite 100 winners whose IT projects have transformed their businesses. Use them to inspire creativity and advance your plans.
This is InformationWeek’s 26th year ranking US companies that use technology in innovative ways. This time the popularity is much more special because we’ve narrowed the collection of honorees from 500 to 100; we now call our ranking the InformationWeek Elite 100. The creativity represented by this year’s 100 organizations has not narrowed, though. An overriding theme of their accomplishments: innovative use of giant data. Out of this elite 100 we’ve chosen 20 of the most convenient ideas to give during this slideshow.
Our list shows companies putting data analytics into action across a large range of industries. If these companies are any indication, in 2014 and within the years that follow business decisions should be more data-driven, data could be more visual and more mobile, more medical data may be made accessible to assist save lives, and more equipment and other “things” would be wirelessly connected to the web.
In the aviation sector, Boeing’s IT and engineering teams collaborated to roll out data visualization tools that allow production employees find and think about aircraft parts via interactive 3D images. In healthcare, Atlantic Health System built a warning system that presents patients’ lab and vitals data to doctors for early signs of sepsis and provides alerts if the patient is in peril.
Like Boeing, Spirit AeroSystems is using data analytics to enhance aircraft production. The corporate tapped SAP’s HANA in-memory database and BusinessObjects analytics tools to scour airplane construction data in finding the source of producing delays.
John Deere is taking wireless data collection to a brand new level in its John Deere tractors and combines. The corporate has added Internet- and GPS-connected sensors and display screens that feed into the MyJohnDeere.com website, where farm managers can quickly access important field data.
As in previous years, companies are pushing the limits of mobile app development. Yet it’s more apparent this year that IT teams must integrate data analytics with a mobile solution to make it truly effective.
Construction and design company Skanska, for example, created its own iOS app to aid construction experts and hospital clients estimate building costs for a brand new medical facility. What sets the app apart is its ability to research energy usage, square foot efficiency, and ROI data.
Similarly, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) developed Convergence, a Windows 8 tablet app that draws data from multiple electronic health record systems and presents a unified view to clinicians. Insurance Auto Auctions (IAA) created a mobile app that simulcasts car auctions, allowing users to look car information and photos, view multiple auctions directly, and get alerts in the event that they win or are outbid.
Wearable technologies inside the workplace are still within the fledgling phase, but Boston hospital Beth Israel Deaconess might signal the form of items to come back by testing Google Glass in various physician and nursing scenarios. Ultimately, Beth Israel’s Google Glass experiment shares the identical goal because the other companies in this list: to offer fast access to crucial data, in a sort and place that employees can put it on to use.
These 20 great ideas are working. Make one be just right for you.
Shane O’Neill is Managing Editor for InformationWeek. Before joining InformationWeek, he served in various roles at CIO.com, most notably as assistant managing editor and senior writer covering Microsoft. He has also been an editor and writer at eWeek and TechTarget. … View Full Bio
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