The intuitive client

Our comprehensive national coverage of security management and related topic areas (including IT, Health and Safety and fire prevention) is designed to assist the already practising and fully-committed professional in their everyday role through the dissemination of useful tips on how you can eke out the best results from your CCTV system or procure a suitable guarding service.

The overall intention, however, is that we provide our readers with the necessary ammunition for Board meetings such that company directors are forced to take note of security and make it a priority on their agenda. For the most part, we are relying on you, the security manager, to impart that message because, quite simply, security is off the radar for far too many managing directors and chief executives. The decision makers with the purse strings who, sadly, remain largely ignorant of the discipline and its true value.

How refreshing it is, then, to encounter the md of a major blue chip who positively bucks that unsatisfying trend. As the UK head of telecommunications giant T-Mobile, Brian McBride is directly responsible for the well-being, safety and security of no less than 8,000 staff and over 14 million customers.

In conversation, SMT asked the 50-year-old Scot what keeps him awake at night (‘Corporate... on call’, pp22-25). The response? “Anything that can damage our service, upset our customers or harm our reputation,” opines McBride.

For mobile telecommunications, read almost any vertical market segment in the UK. The difference at T-Mobile, though, is that McBride not only recognises the dangers of attempted fraud, theft and online attacks but has done something positive about them, protecting his company’s UK operation with a first class, ‘Best of Breed’ security management team who allow him to sleep easily. He knows that his business can never allow its guard to drop. On the door. On its systems. And on its people and assets.

Ultimately, McBride “employs the best to achieve the best”. It is a commercial maxim that many other managing directors would do well to remember come the next budgeting round.

Total Workplace Management is a brand new event run by CMP Information. Designed to link end users with top suppliers, it’s on from 11-13 October at Earls Court 2 (‘TWM: all bases covered’, p31). Visit The SMT Team on Stand G2.