Best of the rest: Honorable mentions

Detroit Medical Center Krispy Kreme Lancaster General S&H Greenpoints Univ. of California - Berkeley Sharp Microelectronics Syncrude What is the User Excellence Award? 2003 User Excellence Award winner

Detroit Medical Center Department of Emergency Medicine

Project lead: Bharat Sutariya, physician leader, DMC information
services
Challenge: Like any healthcare institution, this Midwestern medical center needs to provide physicians quick access to reference materials, patient records and lab results while they’re at bedside. This is especially the case in an emergency room, where doctors are expected to quickly make informed, expert decisions on any illness and procedure. DMC wanted to give its ER personnel a single tool for accessing those varied types of information, while taking advantage of an existing wireless LAN.

Solution: When Palm in the spring introduced its Tungsten C handheld, complete with 802.11b WLAN connectivity, DMC found its answer. With the handheld, physicians could access online reference applications they were already taking advantage of on a limited basis from stationary PCs, as well as get and update patient records and send and receive e-mail. The medical center distributed 150 handhelds to physicians and residents. As a result, another area hospital followed with a 150-device deployment.

Approximate cost/return on investment: $75,000, based on $499 per unit list price; no ROI information available.

What's cool about this project: Demonstrates how far PDAs have come as business-class clients and PC replacements.

Krispy Kreme Doughnut

Project lead: Frank Hood, CIO
Challenge: This doughnut maker, in Winston-Salem, N.C., has grown rapidly in the past three years - amassing more than 300 stores. It needed to make sure local store operators could access critical information such as inventory updates, store directories and equipment maintenance data in an increasingly distributed environment. As the company grew, it had to devote ever more of its enterprise server resources to Windows file serving. Krispy Kreme needed a far more efficient way of handling its data storage and retrieval needs.

Solution: Krispy Kreme’s IT team decided centralized storage was in order. The company now consolidates data from Windows file servers and desktops into a 2T-byte Network Appliance enterprise storage system, which includes virtualization. The storage network uses 1G and 10/100M-bit/sec connections. Store operators can now share real-time information on inventory and other business data across the storage network, while the company’s IT staff sees improved resource utilization, simpler management, and increased performance and productivity.

Approximate cost/return on investment: Cost undisclosed; Krispy Kreme places a conservative estimate of $31,000, in hard drive and server-related savings, on first-year ROI and $93,000 over three years.

What' cool about this project: The project uses a good mix of storage network, virtualization and 1G interconnect technologies to provide demonstrable business improvements.