The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. placed 118th on the recent Information Week 500 list of the nation's most innovative users of information technology (IT).
The InformationWeek 500 list ranks domestic companies with $1 billion or more in annual sales based on patterns of technical, operational and organizational innovation. Combined, the 500 companies represent nearly one-third of all United States-based companies exceeding $1 billion in annual revenue.
"This is a tremendous achievement, and one that we've worked very hard to accomplish," says Eric Berg, Goodyear's vice president for e-commerce and chief information officer.
"It's important to note that the study ranks billion-dollar-size organizations on the basis of their innovative use of information
technology -- not who spends the most money on IT."
InformationWeek says auto makers and their suppliers are making greater use of portals to
improve customer service.
"Six of Goodyear's business units have portals (the seventh is building one) for their dealers," according to the magazine. "Several of these dealers account for more than half of Goodyear's sales.
"To keep making progress, the nation's top
technology innovators have had to find creative ways to invest, redistributing money to make computer systems communicate better, improve data-analysis tools to parse business results quicker, and squeeze more revenue and profit from electronic channels.
"As part of that effort, they're sharing business data regularly with customers and suppliers, connecting more storage systems to speed data collection, making modest strides in securing data against hackers and trying
to keep technical staff motivated in a bad economy."
InformationWeek gathers in-depth information directly from competing companies about how they approach and prioritize their IT
investments for its 500 list.
