MT. LAUREL, NJ – Bill Kwelty, ARI’s chief information officer, presented “Creating a Customer Focused Culture at ARI” at the Information Management Forum held Oct. 18 in Colorado Springs, Colo. According to Kwelty, he also explained how his IT roadmap ensures that ARI is continuously improving the people, processes, and systems to manage the relationships with ARI customers, including the role of industry and customer-provided metrics in enabling IT to continuously improve ARI’s value proposition to its clients. He described how putting the right people in place, developing the proper skills and competencies, retaining staff helped ARI earn 11th place in Computerworld’s Top 100 places to work in IT. On June 27, 2005, Computerworld announced the winners for its Top 100 Best Places to Work for IT Professionals ranking ARI number 11 on the list. Computerworld used a third-party research firm to perform and review the evaluation, which was based on employee feedback and other factors to qualify, a company needed 25 percent of the IS/IT people to respond to the survey and ARI received a 50 percent response from its IT Professionals. Computerworld noted, “An internal ‘Partners in Excellence’ program at ARI seeks to give workers at all levels of the company the tools to best serve customers, either external clients or internal employees. The IT department has never had a layoff, and there was no IT employee turnover in 2004.”