Photo caption: left to right, Mo Seraj, Colin Grey, Iqbal Patel, Pat Ryan, Darryl Hui, Nelson Flores and Ruta Simonavitchious. Front row, Kamil Awid and Senthil Ganesh. Absent, Nermin Jasarevic.

The purpose of a hackathon is to creatively and quickly solve a business problem using cutting edge technologies. Though it is a competition between teams, everyone is working toward the same goal.

Team Iqbot (Nelson Flores, Senthil Ganesh, Colin Grey, Darryl Hui, Iqbal Patel, Mo Seraj and Ruta Simonavitchious) received the People’s Choice Award and second place. The team created a Chatbot AI (Iqbot) to answer questions from Dofasco employees about the technology used on a daily basis. Iqbot provides real-time answers to simple IT questions (for example, how to add a printer?) or starts the process of submitting a ticket to IT Help if Iqbot can’t solve the issue. Iqbot could help reduce the amount of calls to the IT Help desk and decrease call wait times.

Team Orchestration (Kamil Awid, Patrick Ryan and Nermin Jasarevic) created an automated software release and deployment management process to support Dofasco’s continuous improvement model initiatives. With automated software release and deployment management, IT teams can plan, schedule and control the build, test and deployment of releases. This process would allow Dofasco to continuously deliver new functionality required by the business while protecting the integrity of existing services. By automating build releases and deployments, using Dofasco’s existing products and services, IT teams can reduce time to deploy a build from days to minutes, lowering release throughput and increasing agility to react to opportunities and changes. Team Orchestration tied for third place in the Hackathon. Both teams delivered excellent hacks that worked and can be further developed into productive solutions that improve IT efficiency.

Thank you to the judges: Brian Benko, Mary Cahillane and Bob Dabkowski. You can watch a video of the event here. Congratulations teams!