It is my pleasure to welcome you to Information Age’s annual Effective IT Awards report, highlighting our fourth and biggest ever celebration of all that is best in UK IT.

This year’s entries featured over 350 projects across 16 categories and offered a truly comprehensive picture of state-of-the-art IT practice. As well as the now familiar blockbuster infrastructure projects of global giants such as ING Direct and BT, this year’s awards featured organisations that may be small but show they can be just as innovative and effective in their application of information technology.

Some award winners and runners-up delivered significant cost savings; others enabled their organisations to respond more quickly and accurately to changing market conditions; and others still made it possible to launch entirely new categories of service or radically improve the quality and scope of their existing services.

Regardless of the scale of their ambition or the resources they can devote to its fulfilment, each of this year’s winners have something in common: they have all successfully demonstrated that IT, creatively managed and professionally deployed, can dramatically improve the effectiveness of processes, people and the organisations that employ them.

Applause should also go to this year’s awards sponsors – Oki Printing Solutions, JustSystems, Board MIT, VeriSign and FNZ. Without their support, not only would our awards programme not exist, but it would not be in a position to provide support for the award’s beneficiary charity, the Wooden Spoon – the organisation dedicated to enriching the lives of disadvantaged children and young people across the UK.

The Effective IT 2008 programme kicks off with the Effective IT Survey in the autumn. That will be followed early in the new year by our annual Effective IT Summit, before we welcome entries for the Effective IT 2008 Awards. We look forward with relish to celebrating your successes at next summer’s gala dinner!

Tim Langford
Publisher
Information Age