i-SIGMA honors three members with awards

The International Secure Information Governance & Management Association (i-SIGMA), Phoenix, announced the winners of its Member of the Year Award and Presidents’ Award during the NAID & PRISM International Conference & Expo in Denver. Eric Haas, formerly of De Pere, Wisconsin-based A.R.M.S. Inc., and Thomas J. Seibert, president and CEO at Florida-based Business Records Management Inc., each received the Member of the Year Award. The recipient of the Presidents’ Award was Tom Adams, president and chief marketing officer for Flourish Press Inc. and founder of Webvitality.

In the tradition of National Association for Information Destruction (NAID), every year the association’s executive committee singles out an individual with the presentation of the Member of the Year Award. “With the merger of NAID and PRISM International being less than a year old, it seemed fitting to honor two member representatives this year,” says Angie Singer Keating, CEO of Tyrone, Pennsylvania-based Reclamere Inc. and co-president of i-SIGMA.

Seibert serves on i-SIGMA’s board of directors. Christopher Jones, i-SIGMA co-president, says, “I remember the moment when the merger deal died in a PRISM board meeting. We’d decided we weren’t going to move forward with the discussions. If Tom Seibert hadn’t rounded each board member up and encouraged us all to come back to the table, the merger wouldn’t have happened. I think all i-SIGMA members can see the value of the merger after the success of our joint conference in Denver. If it weren’t for Tom, we wouldn’t have experienced that.”

Haas, the other recipient for the Member of the Year Award, is a former NAID president. i-SIGMA CEO Bob Johnson says, “Eric’s determination, research and work during the merger helped to see it through for NAID. It makes sense that the executive committee found it befitting to name him for this award.”

Unlike Member of the Year, the Presidents’ Award is not given out annually; it’s given only occasionally to acknowledge those who have given a sustained, lasting contribution to the secure information destruction industry. According to an i-SIGMA news release, this award has only been bestowed 14 times in NAID’s 25-year history. This year, Jones and Singer Keating thought Adams of Flourish Press Inc. and Webvitality was deserving, given his service to NAID, Professional Records and Information Services Management International (PRISM International) and i-SIGMA.

“Honoring Tom Adams was just something that we knew we needed to do for his extraordinary work in leading our merger to successful completion,” i-SIGMA states in a press release. “He was probably the only person with such deep knowledge of both associations, that also had the professional experience and emotional intelligence to make this happen. We board members can sometimes have big egos and all of us deeply loved our professional associations. Channeling those egos and passions toward our new, combined association required patience, tact and tenacity. Tom was our beacon and our shepherd. Without him, I truly don’t know if the merger would have happened.”