How do you get better at your job? By learning from people with exceptional talent. Every year around this time, CIO magazine presents its CIO 100 Awards, one of the most useful awards programs in the entire tech arena. Why? Because rather than stroking the egos of CIOs by handing out prizes, these recognize actual projects that display IT excellence.

That means you can examine the winners and really learn something about successful IT implementations. Since the list is sortable by criteria such as industry, company size, project type, and business function, you can look for projects that look like what you do every day.

Here's just one example:

Mazda launched an e-commerce system so dealers could generate their own e-commerce sites quickly and allow consumers to complete their entire accessory purchases online. Handling the complete sales cycle, the system includes integration with a shipper to determine freight costs and links to PayPal for online payment. Each dealer is provided a PayPal account to ensure a fully automated solution for selling Mazda accessories. Mazda projects the tool will lead to a 35 percent increase in accessory sales.

Why not seek out a little inspiration from 100 companies whose IT teams are really good at what they do?

-- Don Willmott