The fourth edition of the Annual CIO 100 Awards and Symposium came to a close in a colourful gala dinner held on Friday evening at Enashipai Resort in Naivasha. In this year's event, Kenya still dominated the top awards list.

CIO 100 celebrates 100 organizations and the people within them that are using information technology in innovative ways to deliver business value, whether by creating competitive advantage, optimizing business processes, enabling growth or improving relationships with customers.

Mr.Kevin Kinyanjui, Information Systems Director and CIO of Kenya's national carrier, Kenya Airways, was crowned this year's 'CIO of the Year', taking over from Eng Wainaina Mungai of Royal Media Services who walked away with the award in the 2013 edition.

Kenya Airways on the other hand, emerged as the most innovative company among all other applicants for its Baggage Management System (BMS) which utilises emerging technologies to promote passenger safety and reduce baggage mishandling. The system also provides visibility on passengers' bag location throughout their journey and avails this information to Kenya Airways employees, ground handling agents and most importantly, its flight passengers via all customer touch points.

A mishandled bag is a report of a delayed, damaged or pilfered bag which is recorded by either an airline or its handling company on behalf of a passenger. Further, International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) Annex 17 includes a procedure known as baggage reconciliation.

This procedure attempts to ensure that the only baggage loaded onto an aircraft is that belonging to passengers of that flight who have actually boarded the aircraft.

BMS uses wireless mobility, big data and complex event processing which enables association of data in real time. Working from a centralised database, the system receives and maintains all baggage related data and associated events such as checked in, loaded, offloaded from an airline Departure Control System, DCS. The BMS system then reconciles this data with data input from baggage scans along the path to the aircraft. It ensures that only bags for a particular flight are loaded into the flight and that only bags whose passengers have boarded the flight are also loaded. Centralising the data offers real-time information to Hub connection points as well as Outstations, enabling key baggage information to be seamlessly shared ensuring consistency, and visibility throughout the operation.

In recognition of the various IT initiatives in Kenya's public sector, the IT Leadership award was given to President Uhuru Kenyatta.

Savannah Cement came in as the first runners up with an ERP project implementation. Savannah Cement had implemented SAP All-in-One ERP on a SAP HANA platform. The ERP platform automated key functions within the business mainly Finance, Control, Sales order management, Purchase and Inventory management. We also focused on Business Continuity creating an intricate redundancy system purely powered by SAP HANA and HP tools.

The ceremony also saw firms that were best performing in their industry awarded in PlusOne Awards. The four PlusOne awards were issued in the Financial Services, Public Sector,Transport sector and Education Sector.

Kenya National Library Services topped the Education category with their project aimed at converting library centres to eLearning and Collaboration hub. KNLS therefore invested in a project to ensure all the Kenyan youth patrons can take professional training and get a globally recognized certificate in various technologies right at their village. KNLS IT academies are set to avail eLearning training and downloadable learning materials to enable patrons study for an IT professional course, additionally, the branches have been set up as IT test centres that will enable examination and certification of various technology courses. Through this, Kenyan youth patrons can up skill their knowledge in emerging technologies such as Mobile App development and get certified for the 21 century jobs.

In the financial sector, Jubilee insurance scooped the top award with their project dubbed as "Jubilee Digital Insurer" and under the Transport category National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) topped with their Transport Integrated Management System (TIMS) project.

Under the Public Sector Category, KenTrade took the lead with its Kenya National Electronic Single Window System (KNESWS) project, an online portal that enables parties involved in trade and transport to lodge standardized information and documents with a single entry point to fulfil all import, export, and transit-related regulatory requirements.

For the Country awards, Uganda's Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) emerged the for its Smart City project code named e-Citie. The system focused first on improving institutional staff efficiency through collaboration of the Management Information System which has internal automated work flows and enhanced communication with Microsoft Lync, Project Server to monitor the institutional projects. The system leverages on cost effective technology hardware to offer revenue collection services to citizens using mobile and electronic means. This system helped KCCA grow revenue by 130% in financial year 2013 while minimizing accounts reconciliation challenges that made accounts an institutional pain. The system is being customized to service infrastructural plan approvals, Education Services, Public health services and other future business initiatives.

Tanzania's National ID Authority (NIDA) and Rwanda's I&M Bank won the Country awards for their respective countries.

This year also saw a special award go to Kili, a public Cloud platform which uses Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to deploy most Internet apps. Users can pay with credit card or MPesa. Compute and Storage is allocated within minutes of paying without human interaction. Private networks can be set up for more security. Data resides in Kenya for regulatory compliance and latency to the host is 90% better than typically available to global cloud providers.