The Illinois Student Assistance Commission Receives CIO'S Most Effective IT Team Award From SIM-Chicago and AITP-Chicago

CHICAGO – The Illinois Student Assistance Commission (ISAC) is pleased to announce that it has been honored with the CIO’s Most Effective IT Team Award, an award given to three Chicagoland organizations annually from two of the leading professional associations, the Society for Information Management (SIM) – Chicago and the Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP) – Chicago.  Awards were presented at a dinner held by the associations on November 19, 2015. ISAC is the first government agency to ever receive the award, which recognizes the accomplishments of the team reporting directly to the CIO.

“We congratulate ISAC for the innovation, value creation and hard work that made it such a worthy recipient of this award,” said Scot Berkey, president of SIM- Chicago. Gary Czubak, president of AITP Chicago, added, “It’s particularly meaningful that organizations are nominated and judged for the award by their peers, and that ISAC competed with private and non-profit organizations throughout Chicagoland for the honor.”

Awarded each year to one large, mid-size and small organization, ISAC received the award in the small organization category. The awards are designed to recognize the achievements of the teams as well as the significant role that teams play in the overall success of an organization and contributions to the IT community as a whole. Nominated teams are judged by a panel of peers in award classes based on company size with points awarded in the following categories: cost effectiveness, innovation, change leadership, value creation, service quality, and community.

Led by CIO Ramnath Cidambi, ISAC’s IT team has developed several innovative and cost effective solutions, including two online platforms to better serve school partners and other customers by facilitating and streamlining data input and retrieval related to agency programs. In addition, the team has also been developing applications on behalf of sister agencies to assist them in increasing productivity and compliance.

“We recognize that it’s not often that you see a government agency receiving kudos from other sectors for innovation, service and cost effectiveness,” said Eric Zarnikow, executive director of ISAC. “We couldn’t be more proud of the entire IT team.”