Click Here for List of Previous Winners                         Click Here for Online Nomination Form

CIO of the Year Program - Overview

Since 1995, the Society of Information Management Chicago Chapter together with The Executives’ Club of Chicago and the AITP Chicago Chapter have recognized technology leaders with the premier CIO of the Year Award in Chicagoland.  Candidates are being considered for 4 categories:.

• CIO+ Award celebrates a CIO who has successfully expan
• ded his or her current role into other business areas like Operations, Marketing, Sales, CEO role, etc., thus, broadening their impact on driving success for the overall business entity.

• CIO Innovator of the Year recognizes a CIO who has been especially innovative in his or her approach to producing business results far above the other nominees. 
  

• CIO Impact Award recognizes the CIO that has measurably contributed to their organization's mission, revenue, customer satisfaction, or workforce by leveraging technology and implementing business process improvements.
  

• CIO of the Year honors the best of the best CIO in the Chicago Area.
  

Selection considers leadership in driving business value, technological innovation, business partnerships and creating best-in-class workplaces for technology professionals. Finalists will be interviewed and the winner will be announced at SIM Gala in November 2024.

If you know a company that is doing great things because of its technology leadership, please submit a CIO of the Year Award Nomination.

Each year, 20+ top CIO's are nominated by their CIO peers, company CEOs and other senior executives. Those nominated receive a formal application and prepare an in-depth write-up on their key initiatives, contributions and impact covering several key category areas such as:

• • • Leadership Role in the Business
    • Value Creation
    • Value Protection
    • Team Development
    • Building Relationships
    • Innovation
    • Community Involvement

Each of the CIO category answers are individually scored on a 1-10 basis by a panel of judges consisting of C-Level executives.  Finalists are then interviewed virtually in a series of "Meet the Finalists" Zoom Meetings.  Finalists are then  chosen and the 3 top candidates are interviewed by a panel of senior C-Level Executives to determine the CIO of the Year.

To be nominated the "CIO" must have held the top IT position in the company  (e.g. CIO, CTO, VP of Technology) for at least two years and be recognized as a leader in the industry. The nominee does not need to be a member of The Executives Club of Chicago, SIM Chicago or AITP Chicago, but must be available to attend the SIM Gala Dinner and Awards Ceremony (tentatively scheduled for November, 2024).

Key Dates: 

4/16/2025	Nominations Open
4/16/2025	SIM Summit	In Person	Union League Club
5/30/2025	Nominations Due	Due Date	Online Form
6/3/2025	Nomination Acceptances Due	Due Date	Online Form
6/19/2025	Candidates & Judges Reception	In Person	East Bank Club
7/18/2025	Applications Due	Due Date	Email Document
9/4/2025	FInalist Announcement	In Person	TBD
10/1/2025	Meet the Finalists - Session 1	Virtual	Zoom
10/8/2025	Meet the Finalists - Session 2	Virtual	Zoom
10/15/2025	Meet the FInalists - Session 3	Virtual	Zoom
10/22/2025	Meet the Finalists - Session 4	Virtual	Zoom
10/24/2025	Judging - Final Ranking (non CIO of the Year)
10/27-31/2025	Executive Judging
10/31/2025	Judging - Final Ranking including CIO of the Year
11/19/2024	Fall Gala - CIOY Awards & Speaker	In Person	Union League Club

2024 CIO of the Year Award Winner

Jane Possell, EVP, Global Chief Information Officer, Analytics, Operations at CNA Insurance

Since joining CNA in 2019, Jane has transformed the relationship between the technology team and the rest of the business. Moving her team from order takers to true partners that work collaboratively to deliver business outcomes while also addressing significant technical debt. Jane works with the CEO, other C-suite members, and various function heads to inform and enable CNA’s vision and strategies.

Jane’s team has integrated innovation into their operations.  For example, she and her team developed the New Business Submission Intake (NBSI), which leverages AI and natural language processing to improve the efficiency of information extraction from new business submissions received from agents/brokers. NBSI has saved CNA 15,000+ hours of work time within the first year, with a +90% automated accuracy rate and garnered the Datos Insights Insurance Technology Impact award in 2023.

Further, in partnership with the Chief Claims Officer, IT rolled out an AI-powered Bill review solution to automate the review and reduction of legal fees, driving a $15M in savings annually. Working with Finance, within a year, the team automated 1.8 million financial journal entries from 80+ accounting sources, generating 2,400 annual hours of additional capacity in that department.

Jane also partnered with the head of US Underwriting Operations to reduce average handle time and the expense to support one dollar of new business premium. By moving to agile methodologies, IT reduced the expense of servicing the premium base by 1-2% year over year. The strength of this collaboration led the CEO to ask Jane in January 2023 to take responsibility for the UW Underwriting Operations organization as well as Analytics, so CNA could continue using a data-driven approach to identify technology opportunities to take out cost.

Jane is investing in building a more diverse tech workforce through partnerships with Genesys Works, which provides pathways to career success for high school students in underserved communities, and Girls Who Code. She invests in her own staff by promoting from within and has worked with her team to build a strong culture based on a cocreated set of core values. Those who successfully embody these values are promoted via internal podcasts and awards. As a result of these efforts, her team has an employee engagement score of 82, above the organizational high performing benchmark and industry averages.

2024 CIO Innovator of the Year Award Winner

Doug King, CIO, Northwestern Medicine & Northwestern University – Feinberg School of Medicine

Doug King oversees innovation engines both at "Northwestern Memorial Healthcare" and at "Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine"

The technology innovation at Northwestern Medicine is based on their strategic plan and built on five goals that address patients, employees, research, community outreach and funding their mission. The following three areas within IT drive Northwestern Medicine’s strategy and innovation.

•       The Mansueto Innovation Institute collaborates across NM to rapidly find, evaluate, activate, and potentially invest in innovative technology solutions to issues faced by NM patients and care providers today and the challenges of tomorrow.

•       NM Ventures focuses on external partners by advancing healthcare through partnerships, including business development, asset library licensing, AI product development, and new technologies innovation, and

•       The Research & Development and Digital Solutions teams work alongside clinical and operational teams to design and develop innovative solutions that provide value in four key domains: experience and outcomes, risk avoidance and reduction, cost avoidance and efficiency, and revenue capture.

I want to mention two examples out of many innovative products and solutions that were developed by Doug King’s team, ARIES and Labor Link:

The Automated Radiology Interpretation and Evaluation System (ARIES) is an AI algorithm applied to images that generates a preliminary text-based assessment for clinicians. The model has been trained on x-ray images and implemented through an IRB-approved research protocol with select super users across the health system. Initial results demonstrated a 40% improvement in time spent on reading. NM has filed a provisional patent on the technology and is actively discussing potential licensing and commercialization opportunities.

Labor Link is a software application developed in collaboration with obstetrics and gynecology physicians that allows clinicians to access, assess, and document fetal heart tracings from their mobile devices or tablets. This improves the physician’s experience by reducing the time required to access and view fetal heart tracings by 90%, allowing them to spend more time on patient care and reducing risk. The program has scaled to 225 Ob/Gyn physicians across 8 hospitals and covering nearly 20,000 deliveries annually.

2024 CIO Impact Award Winner

Sean McCormack, CIO & SVP at First Student

Sean has been awarded the CIO Impact award for developing innovative and impactful products that promoted equity and improved safety.

I would like to mention a couple of initiatives as an example, which made a huge impact in our communities across USA, especially these had a great impact on our school going children’s safety.

DriverScore, an analytical tool that was developed in-house by Sean’s data science team, enhances driver safety through the identification and improvement of key metrics based on telematics data. Deployed across approximately 43,000 drivers, the tool has helped to achieve a >40% reduction in Hard Braking and Speeding and >25% reduction in Rapid Acceleration and Idling, keeping students and drivers across the country safer. 

The DriverHub assists drivers throughout every stage of their day: from pre and post trip inspections, to turn-by-turn navigation, ensuring best-practice procedures and providing safer trips for students. Sean’s team has deployed tablet technologies to over 31,000 buses and trained almost the same number of drivers, exceeding their annual target. By June 2025, they’ll be deployed to 45,000 vehicles.

Serving Everyone: FirstAlt

FirstAlt, an Uber-like service that completely runs on digital products and provides districts with a safe and reliable transportation option for students with special needs, students experiencing homelessness, out of district students, and hard to serve trips. FirstAlt is active in 13 states and growing. Almost 3,000 trips are driven daily, achieving 3.7M miles from Aug 2023 to May 2024. Customer satisfaction is industry leading, with a 62% response rate in the recent customer survey, and an OSAT score of 9.53/10 and a Likelihood to Recommend score of 9.68/10. 

Meet The Finalists

2023 CIO of the Year Award

The SIM-Chicago Chapter, in partnership with The Executives’ Club of Chicago and the AITP Chicago Chapter, is pleased to announce the following recipients of the 2023 CIO of the Year Awards.

Click Here for the CIO Awards Press Release

The Award Winners:

• CIO of the Year Award, our most prestigious award, which honors the top CIO in the Chicagoland area

Angela O’Banion, CIO, Cook County Health

• CIO Innovator of the Year Award, which recognizes a CIO who has been especially innovative in his or her approach to producing business results and is exemplary for their change leadership and innovation contribution to their organization

Jason Birnbaum, CIO, United Airlines

• CIO Impact Awards, which recognizes two CIOs that have measurably contributed to their organization's mission, revenue, customer satisfaction, or workforce by leveraging technology and implementing process improvements

Maryann Byrdak, CIO, Feeding America
Raj Sampoornam, SVP & CIO, Byline Bank

• CIO+ Award, which recognizes a CIO who has successfully expanded his or her current role into other business areas like Operations, Marketing, Sales, CEO role, etc., thus, broadening their impact on driving success for the overall business entity

Kevin D. Rooney, CAO & CIO, West Monroe Partners

Congratulations to all our 2023 Award Winners, Nominees and Finalists.

Special thanks to our Judges, Sponsors, CIO of the Year Awards Committee and Co-Chairs: Danielle DuMerer, VP, Technology & Information Security, Shedd Aquarium and 2019 CIO of the Year and Dr. Kevin Lowell, EVP, Chief People Officer & Head of Communications, US Cellular and 2022 CIO Innovator of the Year

Meet the CIO of the Year Candidates

Meet the 2023 CIO of the Year Finalists