Compiled by Patricia Brown

As CEOs continue to look for growth opportunities throughout the organization, CIOs are being asked to contribute to the business in innovative ways. To see what CIOs are really doing, we asked CIOs and other IT leaders, "In the last 12 months, what have you done with IT to successfully enable business innovation?" Here's a selection of their answers.

Nelson Lin: CIO and Vice President of IT Services
Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A.
Ramsey, N.J.

Following the 2003 merger of Konica and Minolta, we have renewed our focus on growth and sustaining our leadership in multifunction peripherals. More specifically, we have targeted three key transformation initiatives:

1. Invest in and grow our portfolio of ebusiness and self-service offerings for partners, customers and employees. For partners and customers, we've implemented tools and technology that help them interact easily with us, including extranet portals that let customers comanage their products with our team. These portals are used to fulfill parts and supply orders, send service notifications, request training and more. On the employee side, we're encouraging collaboration by exposing much more content to the workforce.
2. Leverage wireless technology to transform our service organization and enhance the customer value proposition. For example, location-based tracking has helped us provide quick response times. Similarly, inventory and parts can be viewed in real time after being scanned and tracked via field-workers' cell phones that are linked to our network. This has enabled us to improve first-time fix rates and other key components of customer service.
3. Design and implement new technologies that complement our industry-leading multifunction peripherals. For example, we're working on new technologies that enable the devices to self-diagnose and alert users when there is a problem, as well as to report on parts, life cycles and supply consumption.

By successfully aligning IT initiatives with strategic initiatives, we have seen measurable business benefits. We're investing in these technologies because in today's Web 2.0 world, our customers, partners and employees want to have a choice in how they access data. We're creating tools that not only help them to better manage their multifunction peripherals, but to also foster and grow our relationship.

Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. Inc. is a subsidiary of Konica Minolta Holdings Inc. Its bizhub™ brand of multifunctional digital imaging solutions offers a central resource for document scanning, in-house printing, copying, faxing, and electronic archiving and distribution.

Bruce Reirden: Vice President and CIO
Care New England Health System
Providence, R.I.

Over the summer of 2006 we implemented a wireless, voice-activated phone communication system at one of our hospitals. This product, from Vocera Communications, has significantly changed the way our nurses work on a daily basis and made them much more productive. The core of this solution is a three-ounce badge that hangs on a lanyard around the user's neck. Using simple voice commands, the wearer can initiate and answer telephone calls, search for a person or a member of a group, and issue a page. In aggregate, this simple device saves us hours of nursing time each and every day.

For example, consider one of our nurses who cares for isolation patients. Previously, if the nurse needed additional supplies or needed to leave the room for any reason, the nurse would have to disinfect and rescrub him- or herself when leaving and reentering the room. This is a time-consuming process. Now, the nurse can simply voice-initiate a phone call to a support person and ask him or her to deliver whatever the nurse needs. This way, the nurse does not need to leave the room or spend extra time repeating the disinfecting process.

In addition, each nurse's communications with doctors, other nurses, transport personnel and support staff are expedited. The communications capabilities are now with the persons, no matter where they are, rather than on a desk at the nurses' station.

This is an excellent example of how an innovative use of simple technologies has dramatically changed the health-care work environment. It's also an example of how IT is working with business to enable these changes.

Care New England serves southeastern New England with three hospitals—Butler, Kent, and Women & Infants—as well as the Care New England Wellness Centers and Care New England Home Health. Care New England also promotes medical research and education.

Karen Green: CIO
Brooks Health System
Jacksonville, Fla.

In health care, wireless devices have become the standard to help clinicians increase efficiency with immediate access to information wherever they are located. For this reason, in 2006 Brooks Rehabilitation completed the rollout of 85 wireless mobile laptops to nurses and therapists in our hospital facility, with no plans for adding additional staff to support these devices.

With these devices, we deployed a "PC, heal thyself" concept, using desktop availability technology from Persystent Technologies. This technology has proven its value over the course of the past year. Most important, these mobile devices are convenient and functional, and the clinicians make use of them 24 x 7. Also, by preventing many of the typical configuration issues, we have avoided the need for IT staff to be physically on-site in the evenings and weekends. Our users have been trained so that when they have a problem with a laptop, they can resolve the issue by simply rebooting the unit.

Following the success of the first phase, Brooks is now rolling out another 100 wireless tablets for our 20 outpatient rehabilitation centers, which are located throughout north and central Florida. The capabilities for availability, self-repair and policy enforcement have allowed us to shift our support paradigm from reacting to problems as they arise to preventing them. These devices are more stable than those we deployed previously, and the clinicians don't have to wait for IT to resolve their technical issues. In the health-care business, this is a value proposition that we prize.

Brooks Health System operates Brooks Rehabilitation Hospital, a 140+-bed facility dedicated to helping patients recover from injury and illness. Brooks also operates a network of 20 outpatient clinics in northeast Florida.

Dave Flanagan: CIO and CTO
Lionbridge Technologies Inc.
Waltham, Mass.

In late 2005, Lionbridge made a large acquisition that effectively doubled our size and number of locations to some 4,000 employees in 25 countries. As a result, we faced the daunting challenge of integrating disparate systems and taking advantage of our global development centers in India, China and Eastern Europe.

To accomplish this, we rolled out a series of initiatives designed to enable employees to communicate seamlessly, improve their efficiency and increase their productivity. We first focused on communication, rolling out one platform worldwide to create better messaging, voice over IP (VoIP) and conferencing.

Then, to improve productivity, we rolled out tools that allow our employees to work seamlessly in different offices and countries, and to easily move projects among offices through an internal software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. This put work into a central area, allowing employees to access work from anywhere. Centralization also allows us to increase operational productivity by wrapping workflow automation around entire processes.

Workflow enables our project managers to design, manage and track tasks more effectively than before. We also have transformed content hand-offs—which were formerly done by hand—into automated, online processes. This dramatically reduces the time needed to get projects started and manage them to completion.

By fine-tuning the way we process our work, we have also shifted production from our local in-country offices to our back office centers in lower-cost regions. This has streamlined our operations and allowed our deeply experienced in-country teams to focus on client-facing programs and open new customer opportunities.

Lionbridge is a provider of globalization services, including translation, application development and outsourced testing.

Eric Hulbert: CIO
opus:interactive
Portland, Ore.

In the last 12 months opus:interactive has made a significant change to focus on being a more efficient managed services provider (MSP) through automation, energy conservation, efficient cooling technologies, extensible platforms and scalable solutions. We provide business customers with online services such as Web hosting, managed servers, e-mail hosting and high-speed Internet access, and these solutions are provided through our fully redundant data center.

In the third quarter of 2006 we made a concerted effort to become an eco-aware data center facility with the implementation of a new set of blade systems. This has allowed us to scale faster, use power efficiently, provision servers faster and ultimately close more deals than ever before. More specifically, we recently implemented a full 18-server solution, complete with redundant firewalls, redundant load-balancers, dedicated redundant SAN and full automation. The servers utilize a little more than 15 amps of power, less than half the power needed by conventional non blade servers.

The use of blade enclosures stays true to our "customer first" initiative by providing best-of-breed hardware that truly is always on, easy to manage, extensible, scalable, reliable and eco-aware. For 2007,we plan to replace our entire infrastructure with this world-class chassis and servers.

Opus:interactive offers managed and monitored Web and application hosting, e-commerce hosting, co-location services, business and residential Internet access services. Founded in 1994, it was one of Oregon's fastest-growing companies for three consecutive years.

Matt Tucker: CTO and Co-Founder
Jive Software
Portland, Ore.

In the past 12 months we've implemented several IT programs that enable innovation. For one, we've embraced virtualization and now have more than a dozen virtual machines being used for development and testing. If we need to run an application server with Microsoft's SQL Server, we simply set up a virtual machine. While virtualization technology had been available in the past, over the last year it has really taken hold as a critical tool.

We've also invested in innovations for our employees. We've instituted a computer purchase program that gives employees $1,000 per year to purchase new computer equipment they can use at home, enabling them to stay connected to the office and increase productivity. We've found this is especially important for the engineering staff, who often get their best work done late at night.

We offer employees a choice of computer platforms: Windows, Mac or their own. We believe it boosts productivity to have a diversity of hardware in the office. This also allows us to improve quality assurance, as Jive now "eats its own dog food" on a wide variety of platforms.

Jive Software develops easy-to-use collaboration software that can be used in an open, enterprise class architecture.

Patricia Brown is the executive editor of Smart Enterprise and a business/technology journalist and nonfiction author with 20 years of writing and editing experience. Previously, she was the senior executive editor of Optimize magazine.