On 6 November, Business Continuity and Resilience Professionals from across the globe came to London to celebrate the best and the brightest in the industry at the BCI Global Awards 2019.
The sold-out gala dinner ceremony saw the 2019 BCI regional award winners and colleagues gather at the Novotel West London hotel. The evening consisted of great food, live music and celebrations as we announced the winners of the BCI Global Awards 2019. Keep reading further to discover the full list of winners below.
And if you think you could be in this list next year watch this space for more information about the 2020 Award open dates!
Continuity and Resilience Industry Personality
Ramachandran Vaidhyanathan (RV) Hon FBCI
The judges recognised that RV has played a key role in strengthening the BCI presence in their country. As one of the BCI Chapter founder members, he leads a highly-focused professional life dedicated to business continuity. His dedication has led him to advance in the profession through education, consulting, social, volunteering and generous mentoring.
Most Effective Recovery
Aster Medcity
The judges found it difficult to select one single winner for this category. Each of the nominees are at the forefront of an organization or team that has worked through extreme situations and managed to successfully recover. However after much deliberation they felt Aster Medcity deserved to walk away with the award after facing devastating and wide spread flooding following rainfall that was 164% higher than usual. As a prominent multi-specialty Hospital they executed all of its Response and Continuity Plans to safely and securely evacuate all of its patients and staff. In addition to this, she was able to minimize damage and loss of property while ensuring there was necessary readiness for resumption of services after the incident.
Continuity and Resilience Consultant
Ahmed Riad Ali MBCI
Ahmed is a well-known Thought Leader on Business Continuity and Organizational Resilience. His expertise proves this by his experience on a regional and global basis. He has had a wide experience of over the past 17 years in Business Continuity Management and Information Security Management. In addition to this, he has had experience in IT Disaster Recovery and IT Risk Management. The judges felt Ahmed was a clear winner for this award for his ability to manage and deliver multiple concurrent BCM programmes. He is also currently a Board Member of The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction.
Continuity and Resilience Provider (Service/Product)
GreenCape Water Sector Desk – Drought Business Support
This winner is a not-for-profit organisation which has partnered with several businesses in Cape Town to fight the impact of severe drought. The result was a drought support team who help local companies to reduce water reliance and to increase resilience.
Continuity and Resilience Professional (Private)
Neal Mullen MBCI
Neal has spent a lot of time making significant improvements within his business. Specifically, he helped develop relationships internally and externally while enhancing awareness at C-Suite on a global scale. He also developed an incident room in Manilla, supporting 32 delivery centers worldwide. This allowed their organisation to centrally coordinate incidents across various disciplines. Beyond his organization Neal also fosters the growth and interest in BCM / Risk. He does this through talks, articles and mentorship programmes. All these efforts on a consistent and holistic basis, left the judges with a clear winner of the 2019 Continuity and Resilience Professional (Private) award.
Continuity and Resilience Professional (Public)
Kush Srivastava MBCI
Kush is a qualified Business Continuity, Crisis and Risk Management professional with over 28 years of cross-industry experience. He has been responsible for training and developing almost 100 Business Continuity Champions across his organisation. Specifically, this meant bringing stakeholders together and developing customized training content. They also performed testing and exercising on specific scenarios for a variety of business units. At the same time they also developed BIAs and BCPs at group level. Kush’s efforts to collaborate across his organisation singled him out as the winner of this year’s Continuity and Resilience Professional (Public) award.
Continuity and Resilience Newcomer
Jayne Romanczuk AMBCI
With no prior experience in the discipline, Jayne impressed the judges with her efforts to improve her knowledge and understanding of Continuity & Resilience to become a valued asset to her employer. So much so that her drive, determination and standard of work has led to a strong relationship with the companies National Resilience Team, allowing her to shadow their role and learn more about the global management of resilience.
Continuity and Resilience Innovation
SIMBCM – Online BCM Simulation Game by SARAS Ventures
The 2019 Continuity and Resilience Innovation winner proved the benefits and importance of a complete BCM lifecycle in an online simulation game. It can be used to get stakeholder buy-in and embed the responsibilities throughout an organisation. The game can also act as a platform for BCM learning and development. There is enough practical and real time simulation that covers the six professional practice phases of BCI Good Practice Guidelines. In addition to this, it is also played on an online system using competitive gaming techniques. These competitive gaming techniques allows BC professionals and teams to get a more challenging experience.
Continuity and Resilience Team
Business Continuity Team – Marks & Spencer Plc
The judges were impressed by the small team’s ability to perform a numerous amount of quality work. The work was validated in September 2018 in an audit conducted by PwC. The results from the audit rated the BCM team’s work very highly indeed. For example, there was one quote from the audit summary that the judges thought was worth mentioning. It said that:
‘The BCM function is highly regarded due to its focus on managing strategic and tactical business risks. Its overall integration with business units proved to be the most important part of the process”.
The gala dinner also saw the induction of more Hall of Fame and Gifted Grades members. For instance, the gala commended long-standing BC practitioner Norman Powell Hon FBCI with a moving tribute. The judges awarded Norman his grade because of his dedication to the industry and for also being a global partner.
Lastly, we want to thank you again to our Gala Dinner sponsors Controllit AG and to our individual award category sponsors. Next year’s awards will see some exciting changes coming your way, including the introduction of a new awards category!