2007 EII Award Winners and Finalists
The Information Integrity Coalition received a record-high number of award applications this year: 27 in For-Profit category and 25 in Non-Profit category. The applications represented a wide variety of for-profit and non-profit entities from all over the world, ranging from large telecommunication companies, technology firms, and financial services companies, to humanitarian organizations, research centers, and government entities. The examples of the use of Information Integrity (I*I) principles by these diverse organizations and the positive impact of their I*I efforts demonstrates the importance of I*I to virtually any organization. It also illuminates how much improvement in customer satisfaction, profitability and usefulness can be expected as I*I best practices are more widely adopted.
To win the overall EII Award, the applicant must:
- Have high scores throughout the application.
- Demonstrate a holistic, organization-wide awareness of and commitment to I*I, that involves not just data and computer processes and systems, but also human factors relevant to the generation and use of information.
For-Profit Winners
Gold Winner:
Xansa Plc
Xansa is a UK-based outsourcing and technology company
with over 9,000 employees in the UK and India. Xansa is the
recognized UK leader in the delivery of world-class outsourced
Finance & Accounting (F&A) and IT services, providing end-to-end
services for clients such as BT, O2, MyTravel, LTSB, NHS and the
BBC.
NHS Shared Business Services is a ground breaking 50:50 joint venture between the Department of Health and Xansa. It was launched in April 2005 to provide high-quality finance and accounting services to NHS organisations and thus enable them to focus their expenditure and expertise on doing more for frontline patient care. Payroll and e-procurement services have since been added to the offering. The JV will offer NHS organisations the benefits of guaranteed cost savings, reduced capital expenditure and “best in class” services, whilst enabling about £224m to be reinvested into front line patient care – equivalent to the annual salaries of 3000 GPs or 12000 nurses. NHS Shared Business Services improved the Information Integrity of the services provided by streamlining and standardizing the processes and bringing them onto a common technology platform. This improved the quality and the efficiency of the services, enhanced the controls within the operations and improved the accuracy, reliability and timeliness of the information available to the management and other stakeholders.
Silver Winner:
Motorola, Inc.
Motorola, with $42.8B in 2006 revenue, designs, delivers
and services Mobile phones, set-top boxes, and Enterprise
Communication equipment.
The Global Tracker was the central system that was developed for Mobile Devices business. Estimates by week and daily “units-shipped” information are displayed through a website which allowed users to view an executive summary for each Customer Fulfillment Center (CFC). The Global Tracker provides a concise and consistent view of the entire business, including the ship plan and accurate order-to-ship information. The data was initially input manually to prove the concept, then to improve the accuracy of the data, provided through automated feeds from the Business and Supply Chain source systems. Once a common system had been established, it required the business to follow a common process. The business went through the process of defining standard units, discuss timing of reporting information, standardizing templates, as well as digitizing those templates. The standard system and processes were leveraged to perform measurements which shifted the organization’s attention from reactive fact finding to proactive action taking.
Bronze Winner:
Nova Information Systems
NOVA Information Systems and its European affiliate
euroConex provide payment processing services to financial
institutions and merchants. The companies process for more than
1,000,000 merchants in over 30 countries. NOVA is the
third-largest payment acquirer in the U.S., processing over $195
billion annually. NOVA provides a wide range of services to
merchants, including credit and debit card processing, prepaid
and gift card solutions, and electronic check processing.
NOVA deployed an enterprise-wide system that automates the detection and monitoring of file integrity throughout the various processing systems. The system externalizes the Information Integrity checks from the processing systems, allowing control over systemic integrity checks similar to external audits on business processes. NOVA took the unique approach of centralizing the Information Integrity checks into a single location. This provides the advantage of ensuring that all Information Integrity checks are performed in the same manner, using the same logic, regardless of the origination or destination of the data. This also delivers the ability to perform cross-system integrity checks, which had not been possible before. The deployment of this system has allowed NOVA to change from being reactive to proactive in identifying, researching, and correcting data file integrity before errors impact customers or systems.
Finalist: American Express
American Express is a leading global payments, network
and travel company founded in 1850. The AXP Balancing & Controls
Technology Competency Center (TCC) team is an American Express
Technologies (AET) group who are experts in providing automated
Balancing & Controls solutions that are standard, reusable, and
cost effective for Business, Financial and Compliance
processing.
American Express consistently completes over 40 projects annually, implementing automated controls within their financial processing applications. These controls include both new application development and existing manual balancing processes. American Express has adopted a Balancing and Controls Standard that ensures all deployed controls possess the required attributes to for consistent system and Information Integrity. In addition to the new development controls that were implemented, the Balancing and Controls Technologies Competency Center undertook two major projects this year to automate previously labor intensive daily manual balancing routines for some 26 processes in our US, Canada, Latin America, European, Japan, and Australian financial capture systems. The I*I resulting from this automation not only saves time and money on resources that can now focus on other tasks, it also significantly reduces errors due to previous human intervention.
Finalist: Lufthansa AG
Lufthansa, Germany’s flag carrier boasts Europe’s largest
frequent flyer program, Miles & More; its nearly 14 million
members span the world.
The process for updating account information was converted to an automated process. The result is Scanning and Workflow Integration Miles & More (SWIMM ) which is a BPM initiative that resulted in a fully digitalized handling and skills-based resource allocation process for all inbound correspondence within a single global system. Using business process management (BPM) best practices such as incremental, iterative change and carefully built user interfaces, Lufthansa’s success represents a prime example of a BPM practitioner’s case study. Lufthansa began automating the correspondence-related process in 2004 and expanded the scope of the system to include more process and case types. Now, all inbound correspondence is digitally handled by Lufthansa integrated middleware services to include the member’s frequent flyer status level in the SWIMM task distribution model and now provides enhanced services for costumers with status even if they do not use specific channels reserved for them. The benefits of SWIMM’s flexible workflow model are not limited to large scale projects but can be also measured in the daily business.
Finalist: TSYS
TSYS is one of the world’s largest companies for
outsourced payment services, offering a broad range of issuer-
and acquirer-processing technologies that support
consumer-finance, credit, debit loyalty, healthcare and prepaid
services for financial institutions and retail companies in
North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific regions.
TSYS created a data access team in February 2006 to review the number of team members with access to the mainframe and client data. Although TSYS followed Cardholder Information Security Program (CISP) and Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards, TSYS identified that, as clients’ due diligence processes became stricter and the standards by government entities and card associations increased, it would be prudent to refine processes for restricted access to client data. The data access team conducted a study indicated that clients perceived that access to client data was excessive. TSYS realized that they had to take extra steps to reduce and restrict team member access to client data while also maintaining the ability to meet client expectations and business needs.
Non-Profit Winners
Gold Winner:
The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Center for AIDS
Research
The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) 1917 Clinic
has provided care for HIV/AIDS infected patients since 1988. As
stated in the initial clinic charter, the 1917 Clinic mission is
to provide care for those afflicted, outreach and education to
the community, and research on HIV/AIDS.
To contribute to HIV/AIDS research, the clinic sought to provide a platform for capturing clinical care data on patients which could be used for outcomes and clinical research. Consensus was reached on the data elements to be captured (including: diagnoses, medication, laboratory results) in a structured, analyzable fashion in the 1917 Clinic database. In 1995, the medical records department initiated an ongoing review of all provider notes. Structured information was retrieved and entered in the database by medical records personnel. Several data elements were collected retrospectively starting in 1988, and further information on health services utilization was added starting in 1999. The sum of these efforts was the establishment of a longitudinal cohort that provided a flexible platform for multidisciplinary research as well as a “data driven” clinic where measures such as adherence to the latest therapeutic guidelines or the rapid detection of patients on a medication needing discontinuation due to a newly detected side effect could be efficiently queried. The database enhanced the quality of clinic’s care locally, and allowed to have widespread impact by allowing the clinic to contribute research on HIV/AIDS to the scientific community.
Silver Winner: SKS
Microfinance
SKS Microfinance is one of the world’s leading
microfinance institutions. Guided by the principle that poor
need opportunity, not charity, SKS seeks to eradicate poverty by
providing financial services to the poor.
SKS Microfinance created a fully-automated Management Information System (MIS). Characterized by being low cost, yet effective and user friendly, SKS’s automated MIS has enabled the company to streamline processes, increase operational efficiency and better serve the customer. The automation of information has naturally led to a drastic reduction of the manually intensive processes of entering data into passbooks, collection sheets and ledgers still employed by most microfinance institutions. Moreover, since it is extremely user friendly, it enables SKS loan officers—who are high school graduates from impoverished rural areas—to use the system with ease and independently manage a large client base. Today, a field staffer can independently handle up to 1,000 customers with a portfolio of $65,000, which is unprecedented in the field of microfinance.
Bronze Winner: Lok Satta
Lok Satta (literally, ‘People Power’), launched in 1997,
is India’s largest mass-based, not-for-profit organization for
fundamental political and governance reforms. It combines the
features of a think-tank involving research-and-documentation,
public advocacy coupled with mass-mobilization at the grassroots
level for specific outcomes.
Lok Satta’s Election Watch initiative was a part of its overall campaign for political and electoral reforms in India for reforming the flawed electoral process, decriminalizing politics and changing incentives in public office. An informed voter freely exercising his/her choice based on accurate and complete information is the fundamental building block of a true democracy. The Election Watch initiative, pioneered by Lok Satta, is a creative, non-partisan and grassroots program to empower the ordinary voters with necessary and accurate electoral/political/policy information towards enhancing their participation in voting and helping them make better, more informed electoral choices. Election Watch helps the voters to be better informed of issues and candidates, and promotes cleaning up of electoral rolls, screening of candidates for criminality, and arranging debates among candidates on a common public platform.
Finalist:
Blue Planet Run Foundation
The goal of Blue Planet Run Foundation (BPRF) is to bring
safe drinking water for life to 200 million people by 2027. To
manage tens of thousands of diverse water and sanitation
projects around the world, it needed to solve the problem of
scaling social development projects that has plagued the sector
for the past three decades. BPRF designed and developed the Peer
Water Exchange (PWX) as a solution to the problem of scale. PWX
is the first participatory decision-making system in the world
that empowers grassroots implementers and involves them in the
funding process.
PWX partners in the network include implementer, intermediary, observer, and funder organizations. PWX makes the funding and project selection process transparent and efficient because it is on-line and accessible to anyone able to surf the web. By having multiple partners review the same projects and organizations, it eliminates bottlenecks while increasing cooperation and encouraging knowledge sharing. This model builds on the core competencies of people and organizations by having them do the work that they are best at, while rendering unnecessary excessive fundraising and monitoring activities. Most importantly, it reduces competitive behavior and increases the number of resources that members can use to successfully solve the problem of safe drinking water.
Finalist:
Office of the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County
Under the Illinois Constitution, the Office of the Clerk
of the Circuit Court of Cook County is a part of the judicial
branch of state government with the primary responsibility of
keeping the records for all judicial matters brought in the
Circuit Court of Cook County, which is one of the largest
unified court systems in the world.
In an effort to increase financial accountability and ensure data integrity in collecting, processing and accounting of monies in payment for fees and fines related to a court case and activity, Clerk Dorothy Brown implemented a systems integrated - cashiering solution for the Office of the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County that links the cashiering application to the existing case management and financial accounting systems. The solution also includes an enhanced security feature that provides ‘real time’ monitoring of all fees and fines collection points, access to camera viewing areas via remote workstations and archiving digital recordings. For the first time, the Clerk’s Office can monitor transactions at every cash register. Cameras are also linked directly with the cash registers and can record transactions at the “point-of-sale,” including data on the amount of money collected, the transaction number and the time of the transaction. This comprehensive Integrated Cashiering project has improved overall operation efficiency by 50% to 70% depending on the function addressed. The project has realized projected values in various revenue areas of the Clerk’s Office, ranging from $2,500 to $19,100 per year. Additionally, customer service has vastly improved due to the reduction in turn-around time to approximately 5 minutes per customer.
Finalist: Village of Schaumburg
The Village of Schaumburg is a full service municipality located
in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago. The village supports over 80,000
residents and over 250,000 daytime visitors and workers. Services
offered are complete Public Safety, Fire and Police; Public Works;
Community Development; and, a host of internal services which assist the
citizens, businesses, and visitors in living, working, and recreating in
Schaumburg.
To address the operational inefficiencies and customer service the village began an automated Customer Service Request system (CSR) a number of years. The CSR system allows addressing customer concerns in a professional and expeditious manner. By establishing a standard platform to initiate the request and by having each department address all of their functional specific customer service activities, the CSR became the central repository where a customer request was entered, routed, work done, and satisfaction survey sent out. This process is consistent and indicates if performance measures were met and if the customer was satisfied with the results. The CSR system has demonstrated improved Information Integrity because it has resulted in greater accuracy, consistency, and reliability of service requests. Consequently, the system has improved customer service, reduced operational costs for the village, and has improved the overall perception of village services.
