Brett Cumming
ISE® West People's Choice Award Winner 2019
I attended one of T.E.N.’s ISE® Private Dinners in the past, but I only learned about the ISE® Awards Program after being nominated for the ISE® West Executive Award by one of our organization’s security partners. I was not familiar with this specific program, but after researching more about it and discovering the past executives who had been honored, I realized how significant the ISE® Awards Program is. At that point, the nomination felt truly special.
Winning the ISE® West People’s Choice Award was a bit of a surprise. Looking at the other nominees, they had impressive resumes and serious clout, and I was honored just to be in the same conversation as them. Therefore, winning was an awesome feeling, especially once I took the award back home to the team. My team and I have been busy building internal security awareness, letting our coworkers know that they can rely on us, and that we want to be involved and help the business. Most importantly, we want them to know that we are a real resource for them. Having the award symbolize an external, third-party endorsement allows the work we are doing to carry more weight inside the company, especially when working with other executives and across business units.
Security professionals are often focused solely on their mission, and you can sometimes lose perspective about how your actions and accomplishments are comparing with those in other organizations. Are we above or below average? Are we on the right track? On some occasions, you may even start to doubt yourself. Maybe you propose a project or plan, and you receive feedback from others in a technology or business role that is not encouraging or gives pushback. You may question whether you were right to propose it or build the plan the way you did, maybe even going so far as believing you were off base. Gaining a third-party validation and endorsement can help confirm that you are on the right track and what you are doing is making a positive difference within your company and beyond.
I also attended the ISE® Executive Forum and was overall very impressed. I found the quality of attendees and the topics discussed to be extremely valuable and a great use of time. Hearing a room full of people discussing high-level work and facing unique challenges is the type of information you can’t just read on a blog or get from a training class. As a result, I found the entire forum to be super interesting and beneficial. The CISO Deep Dive panel gathered high-level executives together to discuss topics that might not be tactical in nature but are more conceptual or philosophical, so getting to know where their alignments were on those areas was insightful. The roundtable conversations were all great as well because it gave us all the opportunity to dig into those topics on a deeper level. Throughout the day, I met peers and forged real, valuable connections with them during the ISE® Executive Forum. My team and I left with new connections and conversations that have led to follow-up calls and mutual information-sharing, and even now, we are keeping that collaboration going.
If there was a peer who I thought was doing innovative work or was a high performer, I would certainly recommend for them to get involved with the nomination process, either by nominating them myself or encouraging them to nominate themselves. Even for folks who aren’t nominated, there are many benefits to being involved and participating in the events: the networking, the information-sharing, the peer recognition, the external validation, and maybe most importantly the real connections you build with likeminded peers.