By Frank Gens, Senior Vice President, Research, IDC and Chairman of the IDC/IDG Expert Committee

As we’ve discussed at the European IT Forum 2005 , IDC – and many of the people attending the Forum– see the emergence of a new generation of IT (dynamic IT) as an absolutely critical ingredient for business innovation, in Europe and throughout the world.

Accordingly, this year we have launched the first edition of the IDC EMEA Award for ICT Innovation and Business Transformation , to recognize organizations who have demonstrated leadership in leveraging IT to improve customer experiences, to extend and enhance supplier networks, to streamline the supply chain, or to deliver other important forms of business value.

The winners I’m pleased to announce in a moment submitted IT-enabled business projects that were judged by our expert committee to meet the five key criteria for this award; all three -

• Use IT to fundamentally transform important business processes
• Have delivered tangible and significant business benefits
• Are architected for dynamism - to support changes in the marketplace
• Have significant scope and scale
• Are operational – beyond the pilot stage

And now, on to the three award winners:

Hospital Son Llatzer
Our first winner is, indeed, representative of the power of IT to improve the human condition. Hospital Son Llatzer (in Mallorca Spain), part of the Public Health Service network in Spain, is a showcase for what technology in healthcare can accomplish. The Hospital was designed from the ground up with the concepts of integrated clinical, administrative and management processes; a common information model; paperless operation; mobile professionals; and customer self-service, among others. The net results include: shorter patient stays, higher patient satisfaction, higher physician satisfaction, and a lower administrator to doctor ratio. Importantly, Hospital Son Llatzer also shows that being a business innovator with ICT doesn’t require being a large multinational

Nordzucker AG
While our first winner focused a lot on the Customer Experience, our next winner leveraged IT successfully to enhance the Supplier-facing side of their business. Nordzucker AG, the large German sugar manufacturer and distributor. To transform the supply-side of their business, Nordzucker created a “Farmer Portal” to streamline communication with the farmers who supply them, and bring greater speed and accuracy to transactions within their supply chain. They used flexible, Web-standards-based technology to bridge compatibility issues across organizations – over 2,000 farmers are now connected to the system. The system is delivering major improvements in accuracy, speed and productivity within Nordzucker – including a 3-4 hour reduction per day in paperwork handling - as well as within its supplier network. What I like is that this is an excellent example of how large organizations can take the lead in bringing business innovation to large parts of their business network, even those – like farmers – that are not typically sophisticated in their IT usage.

METRO Group
Our next winner– METRO Group, the world’s third-largest retailer – is very well-known for IT-based business innovation. Many of us have heard of METRO’s “Future Store” project, a pilot project for how IT – in particular RFID – could deliver both a better customer experience and a more efficient retail business. The project that has won this award is actually a follow-on to that pilot, focused on bringing RFID technology out of the pilot phase and into real operations – in this project, the “goods inward” process. Inefficient barcode readers were replaced with RFID readers in 20 METRO Group distribution centers and stores. As pallets and cartons moved through loading docks, the data is now being picked-up in real-time automatically, increasing speed and accuracy, and increasing productivity. To give an example, in the first eight months of the new process, the time required to receive goods was cut by 22%, and the time needed to then verify the accuracy of those shipments was cut by 80%. In the stores, the improvements were 25% and 75%, respectively. This is an excellent example of moving process improvements from pilot to operational status, one cost-justified step at a time.