At the recent Ingenious Awards Gala Dinner, Eugene Roman, CTO at Canadian Tire Corporation was named ITAC CanadianCIO of the Year for the private sector. He has since agreed to be a keynote speaker at the CIO Association national conference that will be held at Toronto’s Allstream Centre April 20-21, 2016.
Other announcements at the Dinner included Lydia Lee, Senior VP and CIO for University Health Network, as ITAC CanadianCIO of the Year for the public sector, and the six Ingenious Award winners. Volunteers from the CIO Association judged the first round of competition to determine the finalists. Association President Gary Davenport represented CIOCAN on the final judging panel to select the award winners.
The winner in the not-for-profit category was Cybera’s Rapid Access Cloud. Led by former CIO Association member Robin Winsor, Cybera is a not-for-profit technology advisory group financed by the Government of Alberta to oversee and develop the province’s cyberinfrastructure. One of the ways this goal is achieved is through providing free computer services to pre-commercialization innovators for one year. Allowing researchers and academics to focus on the science of their innovations without having to find and pay for computing resources is one way to facilitate people doing what they do well. “You are a researcher, you don’t know about business, you don’t know about computer allocation, you don’t have any money behind you” says Winsor.
Each of winning projects is introduced through a video tribute. The winner in the Small to Medium Size Public Organization is Connected North, a program supported by Cisco Canada, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami and SSi Micro that improves education in isolated communities in Northern Canada through high-definition telepresence. As Gary Davenport explains in the video tribute to this project, the project has made classroom learning much more engaging for students, with value of science class ratings increasing by up to 89%.
You can read more details about the CanadianCIOs of the Year here. Descriptions and video introductions of Ingenious Award winning projects are described here.