The award honors CIOs who lead their organizations to pursue IT innovation and business processes that deliver business value. SearchCIO.com congratulates the winners and invites readers to dive a little deeper into what makes them leaders in information technology innovation. Perretta recently recorded a podcast with our Senior News Writer Linda Tucci about building a private cloud at State Street. And we hope you’ll stay tuned for a soon-to-be-released exclusive video interview with Bruno.

In her roles at EMHS, Bruno successfully developed information systems strategic plans and governance designs at three large health care organizations. She has implemented and integrated major clinical, financial and decision-support information systems, two of which received the Nicholas R. Davies Organizational Award, the nation’s highest award for implementation of a system-wide electronic health record. She is the executive sponsor for the Bangor Beacon Community and co-chair for the Leadership and Governance Community of Practice for the national Beacon Community program.

Bruno said being a CIO is about bringing out the best in those you work with, adding that the award also honors those she collaborates with in delivering health care services in Maine.

Chris Perretta has global responsibility for State Street’s IT activities, leading a team of more than 5,000 IT professionals in 29 countries. He oversees the IT strategic planning process, application development and maintenance, system architecture, global technology infrastructure and information security for the firm. Perretta is also the co-leader of State Street’s Operations and Information Technology Transformation initiative.

Perretta said the award is a great honor that underscores his organization’s ongoing work and commitment to using technology to deliver innovative solutions to their clients.

In a statement, award program co-chair Ray Chang said judges were pleased to recognize both Bruno and Perretta “for their strategic use of technology to significantly impact and improve business performance for their respective organizations.”

Chang noted that both serve as prime examples of how technology can drive business success and the important role of CIOs in organizations worldwide.

As the first winner of the new CourionCares Program for Non-Profits contest, the Red Cross received an enterprise license for identity and access management (IAM) and compliance software from Courion to manage user access, demonstrate access policy compliance and improve IT security.

“We have significant issues around identity management,” said Hall, chief information security officer at the venerable organization founded by Clara Barton. “The gift is very much appreciated.”

The Red Cross has about 75,000 users who work with a variety of applications and have varying types of network access, she said. Currently its help desk spends 30% to 40% of its time on resetting passwords manually, a laborious task for IT that involves a lot of downtime for the organization.

“Being able to deploy a self-service identity management solution is a huge work saving for us, and an enabling empowerment for the organization,” Hall said.

The pilot will take place in the IT department, and a rapid rollout across the organization is planned. Hall said she expects high adoption rates because of users’ familiarity with self-service passwords on the commercial Web.

Nonprofits come under the same privacy and access control regulations as the commercial world, whether those involve protecting donors’ credit card information or clients’ personal health care information, according to Chris Zannetos, president and CEO at Courion in Westborough, Mass.

I’ll be following the Red Cross rollout of the self-service user identity management software on SearchCIO.com, to see what benefits — financial and otherwise — the organization reaps.

“We’re expecting that we’ll have a labor or soft savings that’s pretty dramatic,” Hall said. “It’s true that you often have to spend money to save money, and Courion helped us get over that hump.”

The semi-annual call for entries for the next CourionCares award is now open, and the winner will be announced in July. To enter, organizations must submit a 250-word descriptive overview of the IT security and regulatory challenges they face, as well as the reasons they believe Courion’s software will help them with these challenges. All entries must be received by 5 p.m. EST on April 29.

In researching my piece, I reached out to the CIO of the commonwealth of Massachusetts and to the chief deputy director in the state’s Office of the CIO in California. I spoke with each of them about how they’ve worked with their state governors to structure IT so that it can best serve not only the governor and his staff, but state residents too.

That’s one of the differences between public sector challenges versus private sector challenges for CIOs. In the private sector, CIOs are focused mainly on finding and implementing solutions that will move the business’s vision forward while cutting costs and boosting revenues. In the public sector, money matters, of course — particularly with California, as we’ve all heard about the state’s budget crisis — but the bottom line is far more intangible and difficult to measure with traditional ROI formulas.

A successful IT deployment might mean a better database of roads in need of repair, so the local Department of Public Works can fix a pothole before a kid on a bike tumbles into it. Or it might mean planning for the purchase of new desktops so that high school students without Internet access at home can work at the school library. On a much larger scale, the government push to electronic health records underscores the importance of technology in meeting citizens’ everyday needs.

Do I sound like the overzealous press person for a city mayor right now? Maybe a bit (I’m all too familiar with them as well). But one of the many things I’ve been impressed to learn through my reporting at SearchCIO.com is that IT — supported by a dynamite IT governance framework — can enable innovation and success at any level, from the multibillion-dollar corporation to the 5,000-person town.

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