CIO 100: Carsales wins top gong for innovation

Ajay Bhatia (left) with Michael Ridgway

Australian online success story, Carsales.com.au has won the Most Innovative IT Project award in the inaugural year of CIO Australia’s CIO 100 Awards – recognising excellence in technology innovation and business value delivery.

CIOs from the government and private sectors judged several entries for the award, deciding that a search engine developed by Carsales.com.au – a high growth business which enables Australians to advertise, sell and buy new and used cars online – was the best innovation.

Dubbed RyvusIQ, the engine is the brainchild of developer Michael Ridgway. It was initially created for internal use across the company’s many sites but is now being promoted to external classified and retail organisations.

Read: Carsales CIO talks about RyvusIQ innovation

In 2010, Carsales.com.au users wanted to be able to search by multiple vehicle makes, models and colours. The company was restricted by the search platform it used at the time and was not able to respond as quickly as it would have liked to customer requests.

“This and other similar search problems gave birth to the ideas of Ryvus,” Ajay Bhatia, CIO at Carsales.com.au.

“Today, Ryvus solves much more than “multi make and model” search and has become such an innovation platform for our technology and product teams. We expect to continue to differentiate our offering with a solution that can’t be easily copied,” Bhatia said.

Since implementing the engine, Carsales.com.au has experienced a 16 per cent decrease in customer support calls; and a 1 second reduction in page load times compared to the previous search engine. The company can also publish new stock online in less than 1 minute compared to 1 to 2 hours previously.

Service Stream snares second place

Network service provider, Service Stream, was our Runner Up for the Most Innovative IT Project award. The organisation deployed a cloud-based integrated workforce management and service order management platform, which is used by more than 400 technicians and staff providing solar panel and hot water, and other home services.

This new system enabled the organisation to eliminate more than 150,000 A4 pages (based on 7000 jobs annually) and manual “work in field” by providing forms on a tablet device, which are used by these staff to manage jobs. It also provides real-time quality assurance based on logical form structures.

Other finalists included Australian Hearing, Calibre Global, City of Melbourne, Commonwealth Bank, Dexus, GE Capital Asia, LexisNexis Legal & Professional, and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

The full report of the CIO 100 Awards is coming soon.