iQ: What else do you think will help square that circle?

PM: It helps to have strong relationships with both customer and vendor and to be honest about your capabilities. Again it's part of my job (as the person who signs the cheque) to be sceptical. When I'm 'buying' a solution I absolutely insist that we wind all the way back to asking "what's the problem?" and work from there. So if a supplier were to come to me and immediately start talking about a particular vendor's solution without getting to the bottom of the problem first... that would set the alarm bells ringing right away.

So you can be an advisor, but to be a trusted advisor is a quite different and much more subtle thing. The minute you start selling to me you're no longer trusted.

iQ: What you're saying then, is that a provider has to work even harder to get a solution from one of their rostered vendors past you?...

PM: Absolutely, absolutely. As the person signing the cheque, recommending the solution to my board of directors, and putting my reputation on the line (which has been hard won over 30 years but can be lost in about 30 seconds). I need to know that there is an independence in your thinking that I won't find in a manufacturer.

iQ: So the term reseller is really a bit of an anachronism here; but it's not readily replaced with "trusted advisor" or the C-word - consultant, is it?...

PM: That's true. There's no phrase to properly describe what's really needed or where we want to go, but perhaps "Independent advisor" is closest to the mark today. People like me are crying out for independent advice, essentially because it's very hard to get. You either go to a big network who will only ever want to sell you their kit, to a reseller who'll only be interested in theirs, or you sell your soul to the devil and go to a consultancy.

iQ: I guess it comes down to semantics again.
What is Independent advice exactly?

PM: You're right. It's not consultancy because a consultant will typically charge for his "independent advice". Instead it needs to be: "Peter, I've looked at these 3 solutions. Having heard what you're after I'd recommend X, and here are the 50 reasons why. But if you want to fight me over that, question me, and point me in another direction, I'm happy to go there. That's a difficult sell but is it independent advice?

iQ: I know that another part of your remit involves Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning. It must have been interesting to be at the sharp end of that when Insight's Sheffield Offices ended up under water during the summer 2007 floods?...

PM: It was. But you know... our response to things like the Sheffield incident are actually fairly ingrained in our basic modus operandi. We tend not to even think of an incident like that as a disaster. To a degree you expect those kinds of glitches. It's a natural part of doing business... so you, well, roll your sleeves up and get stuff re-routed. Also, technology has made disaster recovery so much easier. Things like remote access and roaming profiles mean you no longer have to sit at your desk, or even a desk, in order to work.
It's also important to realise that disaster recovery isn't all management philosophy; it's thinking about practical things too. Sheffield is the perfect example.
Before the floods ever happened, we had to ask whether the facility could carry on working if something went awry for any reason. Could we re-route phone calls if no-one could get into
the office for instance? Yes, I could re-route calls at the drop of a hat. However, if we couldn't get into the office for two weeks, that would be a different proposition completely.
Gone are the days when your IT was purely about a great big datacentre in a bunker with no user community surrounding it. Now a big part of my IT facility sits smack in the middle of my office, so if I lose that, I also lose my office and all my people too. That impacts, or should impact, my DR planning. It's no good be able to report to my board of directors that "all systems present and correct" 12 hours after the disaster if the building is floating around in water and all my people are still standing outside with nowhere else to work.

iQ: So it's almost a question of when "disasters" will strike rather than if?

PM: Exactly. I'd also add that the nature of "disasters" has changed. 10 years ago a disaster would have been defined as a huge power failure or massive technical failure. Now it's much more likely to be a security breach or human error. This is where it's vital to think about preventive maintenance; preventing the disaster can be much more important than being able to recover from it.
I can overcome the security breach. I can conjure all the nastiness from my system. I can close the stable door. But the real horse has already bolted. Once that breach has taken place, the damage to my reputation is already done and there's not a great deal I can do to repair it.
The danger is in ever believing that you're covered absolutely... there's always the potential for something unexpected to be waiting around the corner. Look at something as simple as Bird Flu. What would happen if there was an outbreak in your area and your business was quarantined? What would your response be?
The answer is that you wouldn't have one. It's a brand new problem; not something you would have even looked at until a year or two back.
As such, I spend a good deal of my time worrying about tomorrow's disaster.
What we're saying is that, whatever the eventuality, you need to keep operating.
You have to. It used to be that your systems could suffer a ten-hour interruption and very few people would know about it. But if your system goes down now, your web site - and maybe even the rest of your operations - will probably go with it, and that makes an absolute public announcement of the problem.
Business is much more immediate now. Customers want suppliers that have an ability to deliver not in days, but hours. But that makes the stakes much higher...
That's what my job's all about. Making sure we can keep doing business.

iQ: ... which brings us full circle to you being an Insight customer as well as an Insight executive.

PM: Quite. And Disaster Recovery is the perfect example of that. Our house has to be in order or, with my customer hat on, I'm saying "Mr Supplier, you're recommending I do something that you don't do yourself". You're suddenly back to that semantic disconnect between supplier and advisor.
We'll get there by building up slowly. We're already there for many of our customers. It's really the only way to become a truly trusted advisor.