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CIDM is pleased to announce the fifth annual Rare Bird Award for Distinguished Contributions to Best Practices in the Management of Information Development. The award is made to the manager or team who submits their best practice for consideration by the judges prior to the annual CIDM Best Practices Conference, The Inn and Spa at Loretto, Santa Fe, New Mexico, September 15-17, 2008.
The Rare Bird Award recognizes the achievement of managers and their teams in developing a best practice that
- demonstrates the ability of the organization to be innovative
- increases the efficiency and productivity of the organization
- provides a clear benefit to customers
- has the ability to transform an organization from ordinary to extraordinary
- can be effectively transferred to other organizations
- demonstrates the leadership abilities of the organization to peers, management, and professional colleagues
Managers submitting applications for the
Rare Bird Award are required to attend the conference.
We prefer that they take an active role in the Best
Practices annual conference through participation as
a speaker or as a showcase or panel participant. To
be eligible for the Rare Bird award, all entrants must
submit their Best Practice for consideration by
July 21, 2008.
Judging criteria for the Rare Bird award include efficiency, customer focus, transferability, innovation, transformational value, and leadership. Please note that all five judging areas must be addressed in your submission to be considered for the award.
Efficiency-The best practice provides documentation and/or metrics that explain how the manager increased productivity, lowered costs, or offered other improvements for his/her company. This efficiency would be a best practice for most companies. Most publications managers would recognize the results as excellent forms of process improvement, content management, minimalism, customer focus, or outsourcing, and so on.
Customer Focus-The best practice features improved methods or processes to incorporate customer needs in the information development process. There is clear evidence that customer input was used in the early design and development stages.
Transferability-The processes shown in this best practice could be transferred directly or with some modifications to other publications organizations. If adopted, the work has a high probability of offering similar improvements at the transfer site.
Innovation-The best practice offers unique approaches to traditional elements of information management, new processes, methods, or technologies that facilitate improvements in the way information management groups work within their company, with customers, or in the delivery of their products. The innovation should be measurable in business terms, such as reduced customer support calls, faster time to market, increased technical accuracy, easy access to concise information, and so on.
Transformational Value-The best practice is an example of creative thinking that takes information management to a higher level. Comments from company management or management peers about the change value of the effort would document its transformational value.
Leadership-The best practice subject matter, process, or results require outstanding leadership from the publications manager or team. For example, the manager or team changed the way work was done in the past, reallocated resources, reorganized for better results, solicited upper management support to bring in a content management system, teamed with customer support for better customer experiences, managed a corporate initiative, and so on.
Past Awardees
2007
The 2007 award was given to Charlie Dowdell on behalf of The Raymond Corporation. Charlie's publications department has developed a new information product and development process that greatly reduces publishing costs and improves usability. This new process development was done at very low comparable costs. They now offer, as an alternative to paper, a high quality PDA or laptop/desktop suite to provide information about their products. In 2007 they demonstrated a savings of $1.6M per lifecycle of manual.
2006
The 2006 award was given to Eileen Jones and Dave Peterson on behalf of IBM. They have created a collaborative global environment at IBM. Working with 10 different companies inside IBM, they have brought people together and built a virtual community through a rigorous program of communications.
2005
The 2005 award was given to Charlotte Robidoux, Patrick Waychoff, and Bobbi Gibson on behalf of the Hewlett-Packard DocKeeper Process Efficiency team.
2004
The 2004 award was given to Janet Williams-Hepler on behalf of her team at Microsoft, which is responsible for the user assistance for the Office applications.
To read more information on Microsoft's innovation, read the article by Jonathan Price.
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