Nicole Bradberry, CIO of Rise Health Inc., for making something out of nothing by leading her team to create a custom Web application to manage electronic health records.

“The service we wanted to create focused on preventive patient health care that would result in savings for our customers. To do this we needed to give our employees access to actionable data from multiple sources, and that type of solution didn’t exist,” Bradberry said.

Kevin Soohoo, director of IT at Air Systems Inc., for thinking globally and acting locally by saving energy and making the business more profitable to boot.

“And when it came down it — IT and energy use — we really wanted to think outside the box. Things like servers or virtualization, obviously many people are doing it and are getting great results in terms of energy savings and footprints. What we really wanted to do was take it another step further, which was going down to the end-user level and saying, ‘End users, in their cubicles, they’re using energy. They’re using energy on the computer. They’re using energy on their printers. They’re using energy on other things in their cube, like their radios and heaters.’ We really wanted to try to see if we could impact that and manage that, at the same time trying to balance the users’ comfort and not inconvenience them,” Soohoo said.

Paul Stamas, vice president of IT at Mohawk Fine Papers Inc., for reinvigorating a business in danger of being overrun by technology, by taking advantage of cloud technology to make the business run better.

“Even though the world is against us, in terms of paper, we’re going to have the best year we’ve had in 80 years, going to twice the EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization] that we had the previous year,” Stamas said.

Steve Mallard, IT manager and teacher at the Tennessee Technology Center at Shelbyville, for taking the time to make IT matter to the lives of students and his school.

“My father told me to stop and listen to people. To hear them as they speak and to listen to what comes from their heart and soul. He was correct in every way. You can truly tell who people are if you stop and listen to them beyond the audible sounds. Being a teacher and consultant for so many years, this has become an asset and skill handed down to me.”

Over a decade ago, the company was looking at improving upon a common household chore: mopping. It studied how people mopped their floors by going into homes and watching them mop. Of course — just as I clean before our cleaning people arrive — their studied homeowners were pre-cleaning their floors before the P&G folks ever got there. Makes it kind of tough to study dirt when you’re cleaning a clean floor, right? The researchers had to get sneakier. They started arriving with dirty shoes and surreptitiously spilling dust as they showed up. At one home, a practical grandmother walked over to her roll of paper towels, wetted it under the tap and then spot-cleaned the dust off the floor. And in that moment, the Swiffer was born.

When the Swiffer came out in 1999, I was working at a big data company, helping Wall Street analysts understand the impact of the new products on stock share. We watched as the P&G shares hiked 130% in Swiffer’s first year. By 2008, P&G stock was trading at 37 times what it was before Swiffer’s debut.

When I heard the story of Swiffer’s innovation inspiration — the wet paper towel — the first thing I thought was, “My grandmother did that all the time.” It’s true: throughout the 70′s and 80′s, whenever we tracked in mud or dirt, she’d chase after us with a wet towel, erasing our footprints as we walked. Incidentally, my grandfather had worked in the P&G paper mills for his whole life, making that very same paper towel.

Just think: that innovation inspiration was right there at P&G’s fingertips back in the early 70′s. If only they had engaged a dialogue with their own employees about how they were using the products in real life. Think of the impact on their fiscal health if those gains had been realized 20 years sooner.

Chances are that your next great IT innovation has already been discovered by the people you see every morning when you get your coffee in the cafeteria. Your employees are already doing things, right now, that might change the face of your business tomorrow. It’s up to the CIO to tease that innovation inspiration out and into something that can benefit your bottom line.

Oracle has completed its sixth acquisition of 2011, purchasing cloud-based customer service provider RightNow Technologies for its motley crew of cloud services. We’ll see whether Amazon.com starts shaking in its boots, but it seems doubtful that this acquisition will affect trends in cloud computing.

If networks start to look like the cloud, does networking need its own DevOps movement? Stacey Higginbottom thinks so.

Something to consider for your next user-integration project: Computer voices are mostly female because our brains are wired to like them better. Unless, of course, it’s Morgan Freeman’s voice; then, all bets are off.

We’re all sick of those reports about the sky falling, but in this case, the sky is indeed falling. A German satellite has made an “uncontrolled re-entry,” crashing somewhere in Southeast Asia.

It’s been 10 years since Apple introduced the world to the iPod. The event was a new high-water mark for the company as it moved from being a boutique brand to a major player in the tech arena. IPods used to max out at 10 GB. They grow up so fast!

IT leaders should focus on simplicity, calculated risks and trends like cloud computing and desktop virtualization, advised analysts at last week’s Gartner Symposium/ITxpo.

Worried that the PC is dead? Rumors of its death seem to be greatly exaggerated. Even in a floundering economy, Intel’s quarterly results are better than those from Apple, which missed its Q4 earnings estimates.

Another major birthday: Ubuntu turned 7 this week. Mark Shuttleworth points out that the use of Ubuntu is one of the biggest trends in cloud computing.

The arguments for application modernization are many: Increasingly mobile workforces want access to back-end systems without having to call on IT; new generations of workers prefer Web-based interfaces; and the money previously spent on maintaining legacy applications can be put to better use elsewhere.

Technology and services options abound to make the move easier. Applications can be retired and moved to a Software as a Service (SaaS) provider, removing the need to support and maintain the software. There are companies that specialize just in migrating data out of older systems into a new ERP suite, and there are vendors that will do a code audit, removing wasteful code and using the “good code” to build a new application.

But for each of these steps, there are months of up-front preparation. The first step is choosing which applications stay and which can go. Skill sets must also be evaluated to figure out which modernization path is the best fit— for example, does your staff need to learn a new programming language if a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is you application retirement path? You will also need to factor in and plan for business disruptions.

You could also choose to not modernize the back-end system and instead build a new front-end. In this case, it may be simpler to leave the back-end alone and enable a larger set of users to meet changing business needs with a friendlier interface.

Or is this a Band-Aid?

Let us know what about your application retirement plans; email Christina Torode, News Director.