6 Secrets 100 Winning IT Organizations Share

All eyes were on the InformationWeek Elite 100 conference in Las Vegas this past week as we unveiled some of the top projects in IT, and every single one of the top 5 recognized projects fit into the big data and analytics area.

Some of the top CIOs in the world and their teams gathered at the event to celebrate and recognize these game-changing IT projects. Let's take a look at a few of them.

A project at FedEx was aimed at speeding up the import/export process for business customers. The process was feeling the drag of disparate internal systems and a complex customs environment that included many geographies. To fix it, FedEx Services launched the Clearance Customer Profile app to help businesses get past customs clearance hurdles. The app, which earned the No. 5 spot on this year's Elite 100, relies on a service-oriented architecture (SOA), J2EE, Hibernate, Oracle Database, Spring, Tibco, and JMS infrastructure, among others.

[Want to know more about the 2016 Elite 100? Read The Elite 100: Celebrating the People Who Make IT Happen.]

"The real power is not the individual technologies, but how we've assembled them into a more flexible IT systems model," Paul Rivera, VP and CIO of FedEx Latin America told InformationWeek in a phone interview. "The power is in the way we used them to solve a problem."

Penn Medicine's project uses existing data from electronic health records to perform real-time predictive analysis of heart failure patients. The technology called Penn Signals, which was awarded the No. 4 spot in this year's Elite 100 ranking, places patients in risk groups and assigns them to cardiology resources to get them the best care to improve their outcomes.

"At the highest level we feel institutionally that, if a health system isn't mining its data to guide clinical care, it's like leaving money on the table in a poker match," said CIO Mike Restuccia, in an interview with InformationWeek. "It's a shame that you did it."

Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey's project implemented a fee-for-value healthcare delivery model that uses new technologies to gather data and improve member experience. The project followed the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and was created with three goals in mind.

"The first is the overall improvement in the quality of healthcare, the second is improvement in the total cost of care, and the third is enhancing the patient experience," CIO Doug Blackwell told InformationWeek in an interview.

Horizon's Health Care Value Strategy was born, designed to reward care quality. The organization used a buy, build, and partner approach to focus on five key areas -- information sharing and analytics, clinical excellence, organizational alignment with provider partners, patient engagement, and improved member experience. The efforts earned the company the No. 3 spot in the 2016 InformationWeek Elite 100

The Weather Company's project  to modernize data collection, storage, and forecasting won it recognition in the 2015 InformationWeek Elite 100, and for the 2016 awards, the company moved the bar even further and grabbed the No. 2 spot. Its project continued the effort, combining weather data with business data to improve decision-making for a wide range of companies.

"Weather, at the end of the day, is the original big data problem," CIO and CTO Bryson Koehler told InformationWeek in an interview. Weather is also the largest single external factor affecting business performance, to the tune of nearly $1 trillion lost annually in the US alone. By combining weather and business data, The Weather Company is improving business decisions for a wide range of companies across industries.

Capital One ranked first in the 2016 InformationWeek Elite 100, with an example project of its Capital One Wallet mobile app. This app is an implementation that came from the company's Design Thinking, an approach for developing goods and services. The company sends executives to Stanford University's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design for training, and then incorporates the methodology throughout the organization.

"Fundamentally, our products are customers' experiences that are principally distributed through software," Capital One Financial CIO Rob Alexander told InformationWeek in an interview. "With that understanding we embarked on a shift from IT to technology."

While those are the top 5, there are plenty more projects and coverage. All the information you need about the Elite 100 can be found here.