1/11/2006 2:55:00 PM
CIPS Board Member Stephen Ibaraki Receives Three Top Honours

CIPS National Board member Stephen Ibaraki I.S.P. has a reason to be smiling. He has recently been awarded with three top honours: the Lifetime Achievement Award; the Most Valuable Professional Award; and the Distinguished Fellow Award. Each award is from three different organizations: IT media Computing Canada, IT giant Microsoft., and internationally-known Network Professional Association. All three organizations are recognizing Stephen's tremendous work and dedication in the Information Technology (IT) industry.

Stephen is also a member of the CIPS Hall of Fame as the 2001 recipient of the CIPS Gary Hadford Professional Achievement Award for his outstanding IT achievements and high degree of competence in the IT field. (See http://www.cips.ca/it/awards/.)

Computing Canada's Lifetime Achievement Award
The Lifetime Achievement Award is one of six prestigious awards given to professionals as part of Computing Canada's IT Leadership Awards program.

The IT Leadership Awards program represents the highest of honours for the business technology industry with an estimated size of 500,000 to 800,000 professionals from business, industry, government, media, and education. The awards program in association with CIPS "were created to recognize the achievements of IT professionals whose ideas and works have made a positive impact on their organizations. Computing Canada's IT Leadership Awards are the first of their kind, recognizing outstanding achievements at the individual and team level."

"Stephen Ibaraki is the kind of person who runs directly into the fire, knowing there will be some good coming from the experience. During the course of his career as consultant, mentor, teacher and writer, Computing Canada's Lifetime Achievement honoree often worked 20 hours a day, seven days a week to advance the agenda of Canada's high-tech industry," said Patricia MacInnis, Computing Canada Editor.



Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional Award
The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award is given to professionals "for their demonstrated technical expertise, willingness to help others and commitment to technical communities. MVPs are technology's best and brightest and a stellar group of individuals from around the world who have demonstrated a willingness to reach out, share their technical expertise with others and help individuals maximize their use of technology."

Microsoft established the Most Valuable Professional award more than eleven years ago. The award serves as a way to recognize individuals' outstanding achievements in various community initiatives both nationally and internationally. Initiatives include award recipients' participation in public speaking sessions, top user groups, newsgroups, message boards, Web sites, and books.

Networking Professional Association's Distinguished Fellow Award
The Distinguished Fellow award represents the highest of honours with an estimated size of more than 20 million professionals from business, industry, government, media, and education in more than 100 countries. This honour highlights an earlier award in 2002 when Stephen, after a worldwide search for finalists, was the inaugural recipient of the international Lifetime Career Achievement Award for Professionalism presented at the Networld+Interop Conference held in Las Vegas. This is the highest of international awards for outstanding lifetime business/technology achievements and contributions, integrity, and professionalism in the industry.

Stephen is the only international [non-US] recipient of this Distinguished Fellow honour. This special international Distinguished Fellow honour was given to Stephen in recognition of his long history of contributions, his outstanding and long sustained demonstration of top-ranking technical competence, exceptional professionalism, integrity, demonstrated service, significant industry contribution, and noted leadership.

CIPS extends a special congratulation to Stephen!

For more information about any of the awards above, contact:

IT Business Group, Computing Canada Magazine
(416) 733-7600
http://www.itbusiness.ca/

Network Professional Association
1-888-NPA-NPA0
http://www.npanet.org/

Microsoft
MVPGA@microsoft.com
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/ or http://www.microsoft.com/