SAS Intelligence Enterprise Awards

Recognising & rewarding innovation

The SAS IEA awards honoured and recognised companies that were credited with the introduction of ground-breaking innovative concepts.

Devendra Parulekar, Associate Director, Ernst & Young, speaking at the awards ceremony

Innovation is the key to success in any business. From an economic point of view, innovation must increase the business value and customer value. In the organisational context, innovation should enhance performance and growth through improvements in efficiency, productivity, quality, competitive positioning and marketshare.

The SAS Intelligent Enterprise Awards seek to recognise and reward innovative IT deployments. The goal of any innovation is to solve a problem. The nominees in this category had brought about innovation in their respective companies to overcome challenges and improve efficiency, productivity, and, last but not the least, customer satisfaction.

Parameters

Since innovation is considered one of the major drivers of the economy, the factors that lead to innovation are also critical. Hence the jury members evaluated all the participants based on criteria such as whether the innovative concept is really ground-breaking and does it provide a competitive advantage.

Other parameters included questions such as does it use an emerging technology, is it a leading practice, the number of people impacted by it and what are its tangible benefits in terms of savings in cost, increase in revenues, decrease in IT spend, and revenue leakage prevention. These questions were put to the participants to derive indepth information on the IT initiative.

Criteria

• Innovativeness of the concept—is it really ground-breaking?
• Competitive advantage—does any other competitor / organisation already has it?
• Does it use an emerging technology?
• Is it a leading practice?
• What are the number of people impacted?

What are its tangible benefits:

• Savings in cost
• Increase in revenues
• Decrease in IT spend
• Revenue leakage prevention
• Implementation efficiency / hurdles faced

Categories

The different categories for the award were banking & finance, construction & utilities, government & infrastructure, health sciences, industrial production, IT / ITeS, media & entertainment, retail & consumer products, and SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform of the Year.

Evaluation process

The process of evaluation was similar to the one adopted by the Microsoft Security Strategies awards, as part of which the Indian Express Group had invited nominations from all over India. Applications were received by the Indian Express in the form of a filled-in questionnaire and details of the initiative.

As the second step, each nominee gave a presentation of their IT initiative in front of the jury panel. The jury evaluated and rated the nominees and Ernst & Young tabulated the scores to determine winners.

The jury consisted of members such as Satish Naralkar, MD & CEO, NSE.IT, Terry Thomas, Partner, Ernst & Young, Manish Choksi, President, Strategy & Technology, Asian Paints, Sandeep Phanasgaonkar, President & CTO, Reliance Capital, and Sunil Mehta, Senior VP & Area Systems Director, JWT.

“We were looking for IT initiatives that were innovative and lent a competitive advantage to the company. It was important to ensure that any other company had not deployed a similar initiative because the whole idea of giving the awards was to recognise technology initiatives that were first-of-its-kind,” said Devendra Parulekar, Associate Director, Ernst & Young, while making a presentation on the awards.

Scoring was done on a one to nine scale. Score one meant that the nominated company met none of the criteria, three meant the company met few of the criteria, and a five meant the company had met half the criteria. A seven meant most of the criteria were met and a score of nine was awarded to those companies who met all the criteria.

Innovation can lead to success only when actions meet with goals. Companies that understood this, took the trophy home.