Rare Bird Award

The Rare Bird award was established in 2004 and is given for distinguished contributions to best practices in the management of information development. The award is made to the manager or team who submits their best practice for consideration by the judges prior to the annual CIDM Best Practices Conference.

The Rare Bird Award recognizes the achievement of managers and their teams in developing a best practice that

• demonstrates the ability of the organization to be innovative
• increases the efficiency and productivity of the organization
• provides a clear benefit to customers
• has the ability to transform an organization from ordinary to extraordinary
• can be effectively transferred to other organizations
• demonstrates the leadership abilities of the organization to peers, management, and professional colleagues

We prefer that the managers submitting applications for the Rare Bird Award take an active role in the Best Practices annual conference through participation as a speaker or as a showcase or panel participant.

Past Awardees

2010

The 2010 award was presented to Carolyn Inkster, Steve Brady, and their IBM team for an extremely effective, customer-oriented best practice that took great leadership to bring to the market in a timely manner.Developing a robust metadata strategy, IBM was able to leverage a single set of source files for a series of 18 Install and Upgrade guides. Increasing their productivity in authoring and maintenance, IBM reports that the customer's productivity and satisfaction has also increased as a result of the new documentation method.

2009

The 2009 award was presented to Volker Oemisch on behalf of Alcatel-Lucent for its OneDoc strategy. In a highly effective best practice of outstanding efficiency and exemplary corporate leadership, Alcatel-Lucent's OneDoc program defines common processes, standards, and tools in one community of information development. The result of their work is a textbook case for identifying and implementing best practices in a merger environment.

2008

The 2008 award was given to Virginie Ahrens on behalf of two ILOG S.A. teams working collaboratively to develop the ILOG OneContent Platform. Citing a tremendous reuse and localization savings, the teams continue to refine and enhance their single-sourcing strategy.

2007

The 2007 award was given to Charles Dowdell on behalf of The Raymond Corporation. The Raymond Corp. publications department developed a new information product and development process that greatly reduces publishing costs and improves usability. Charles' group began offering, as an alternative to paper, a high quality PDA or laptop/desktop suite of information to cover their products.

2006

The 2006 award was given to Eileen Jones and Dave Peterson on behalf of IBM. They have created a collaborative global environment at IBM. Working with 10 different companies inside IBM, they have brought people together and built a virtual community through a rigorous program of communications.

2005

The 2005 award was given to Charlotte Robidoux, Patrick Waychoff, and Bobbi Gibson on behalf of the Hewlett-Packard DocKeeper Process Efficiency team.

2004

The 2004 award was given to Janet Williams-Hepler on behalf of her team at Microsoft, which is responsible for the user assistance for the Office applications.

To read more information on Microsoft's innovation, read the article by Jonathan Price.