ACT-IAC Announces 2015 Igniting Innovation Award Winners

Megan Smith, Federal CTO

The American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council’s (ACT-IAC) Institute for Innovation this week announced the winners of the 2015 Igniting Innovation Awards, a recognition program that honors solutions, tools, services and programs that address government’s biggest IT challenges. New York City’s Department of Transportation won the 2015 Igniting Innovation award for their project, “NYCStreets Permit Management,” which enables utilities and contractors to apply for over 400,000 street excavation permits each year with their mobile or desktop devices.

“Every day government not only delivers successful mission outcomes, but also seeks new and innovative ways to serve the nation; Igniting Innovation serves as a new platform for sharing ideas and spreading adoption of these innovative approaches,” said Andy Robinson, ICF International and Institute for Innovation Chair. “Our finalists demonstrated some of the exciting results agencies are achieving, yet it’s only a sample of what can be accomplished by using technologies such as cloud services, big data and shared services to improve citizen services, speed governmental functions and protect our citizens and the homeland.”

Federal CTO Megan Smith delivered the keynote presentation, during which she congratulated all of the Igniting Innovation finalists for showcasing how both government and industry are using technologies such as reuse, open data and agile development to help agencies fulfill their missions. Faced with budget constraints and limited resources, agencies are still overcoming IT challenges by leveraging solutions that have been developed as a result of public-private sector engagement. Referencing her team’s first area of focus, technology policy, Smith said one of their priorities is “working on the policy to help America’s innovators do their thing and bring us to that future, while we still work on public safety, privacy and security. Igniting Innovation 2015 helped expose some of those innovators on Thursday.”

This event offered government and industry the opportunity to explore the Top 30 Finalists’ programs through a “science fair” style exhibition. Attendees narrowed the competition to the Top 8 finalists via social media, and the finalists presented live “Shark Tank” presentations.

In addition, a judging panel of government and industry IT leaders presented Dynamite Awards in five categories to the following organizations:

3 Rs (Recycle, Reduce & Reuse) – Innovative Architecture Exploits Big Data to Prevent Fraud and Misuse, Social Security Administration and Lockheed Martin
Citizen Impact — TSA Pre✓®, Transportation Security Administration
High Risk, High Reward – Emergency Medicine Management Tool (EMMT) Process Analytics Application, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and SyntheSys LLC
Incubator – PEAK Real Time Eligibility, State of Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology
Most Disruptive – Army NETCOM Secure Passive Optical Network (SPON), U.S. Army and NCI Information Systems, Inc.