Guest post by Nathaniel Lim, General Manager, International Summit Awards
At the Summit Awards Banquet in Atlanta on 7 May, I had the pleasure of presenting the award for Best of Show in the 2013 International Summit Awards (ISA) for the Los Alamos National Laboratory External/Public Website. Ann Rafferty, Web project lead, and Lilly Anaya, Web team leader, accepted the award on behalf of the IRM-CAS Web Team, which included entry contributor, Monika Bittman.
This year’s Best of Show (BOS) judges, Deborah Sauer—Lead, Mark Hanigan, and Deborah Baxley-Doyle, reviewed three Distinguished Award winners that were nominated for Best of Show by ISA judge teams. Based on the ISA judges’ recommendations and their own reviews of the entries, the BOS team praised the clear winner with the following citation:
This crisp, innovative website engages a diverse audience, children through experts, with rich, multi-dimensional content that is relevant and fun!
The Los Alamos team describes their experience since winning this award:
The Web team at Los Alamos National Laboratory has felt greatly honored by the STC Best of Show award. We received the judges' comments, met as a team and reviewed them, and have taken immediate action on several of the issues that impacted the overall user experience, consistency of presentation, and delivery of content. So the award also inspired us to revisit ways we can improve. The professional and valuable feedback from our peers and colleagues was highly motivational for us!
Some larger institutional needs were also met through receiving acknowledgement on this level from such a respected professional association as the STC. Based upon the outside recognition we received, we are able to better position ourselves as trusted authorities when asking stakeholders, management/leaders, and internal customers to follow standards and best practices. Thus, leveraging the acknowledgement we received from your organization will enhance our overall Web communications and stakeholder relationships.
In this quickly changing technical world, convincing customers to follow a new way of doing things sometimes presents serious challenges and resistance to change itself. We can now point to a “home run” and ask for internal customer support from a place of greater external perception of our worthiness. In a high-powered, talented, science-based community like ours, having outward peer and colleague acknowledgment commands their respect, along with providing our own analytics, assessments, and ideas about best practice.
From an overall process perspective, the conference presentations this year gave us new ideas and concrete support for reworking our highly discipline-oriented organization into more agile, modular teams to improve performance, the communications products, and our business objectives. We will be able to do more with less and still provide a quality product and service.
Many thanks for allowing us to glow and shine and to be recognized for the huge task we faced in 2012-13 and for our success at communicating to our audiences about the challenging, complex world we have here at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
We would also like to thank the judges for their sincere, thoughtful, specific assessments. The feedback was highly valued and we are able to make immediate improvements based upon them.
Congratulations again to the 2013 ISA Best of Show winners and my thanks to all the ISA judges!
Ghost written by STC senior member Paula Robertson, my ISA Judge Manager. TY, Paula.