VIP PARMAR - Global Head of Data Management at WPP

We had the pleasure of talking with Vip to get his perspective on making data more accessible, the importance of entrepreneurial spirit and where human skills still count at a time when technology is rapidly evolving.

Energetic about data and enthusiastic about future possibilities, Vip’s career has taken him from operations at telecoms company Tiscali, onto TalkTalk, and now he heads up data management at WPP. This creative transformation company is a world leader in marketing services, with more than 100,000 people across 100 countries.

In partnership with servicenow

Prepare for Vip’s powerful takes on collaboration, failure and putting business objectives first before the latest shiny technology.

Bridging the data gap

We started our conversation with Vip in an area that may be familiar to many data leaders – how to make the wealth of data in their organisation more accessible and usable.

Throughout his career, Vip has observed that only about 15% of workforces can confidently access and leverage data. Determined to change this, he has poured his efforts into improving data accessibility and fostering a culture of learning.

The key theme to this is a people-first approach. Vip shares, “It's very important to make sure that people can actually access data in an intuitive way which isn't daunting to them.”

He expands on this, “Us humans are very resistant to change. We don't like new ways of doing things. We default to what we know best. So, by having more of an understanding of human behaviours and what drives us to change – and how compelling things need to be, how simple and intuitive they need to be – making sure that we're factoring all of those things into delivering solutions and getting those outcomes is absolutely paramount.

“Also educating people in terms of what insights that they can get where and guiding them through the tools, the processes, the ways of working, so not only can they leverage that for themselves, but they can guide their teams and their peers around how best to actually do that.

As Vip has touched on, there’s a need for a cultural shift to turn data from a specialist resource into a universal capability. We wondered how he and the wider team at WPP are handling this?

“Trying to push people into changing ways of working or mandating things is often met with resistance,” Vip points out.

“So, it's more about leading people to them, helping people understand how they might benefit – how a new process or a new piece of tech might be compelling for them. And then letting them make the decision.

“I think trying to drive that change naturally rather than forcing it is absolutely imperative.”

But as well as helping lead people to make decisions for themselves that will positively impact the organisation, making the right decisions about the scale of change for the organisation is also part of the equation. And that doesn’t always mean taking the path of least resistance.

Vip shares, “What I've learned a tremendous amount about over the last few years is it’s not all about adaptation, sometimes it’s about reengineering the things we do.

“Sometimes making parts of a process better or more efficient isn't necessarily the right answer. We might need to be bold and brave, redesigning and creating a completely new process.”

Of course, a larger scale change can be more difficult to manage, with people having to learn something from scratch rather than simply adapting to an adjustment. How is this larger scale of change handled?   

“Again, it's about people bringing people along on that journey and then making them very in tune to what that means for them and the benefits that it actually brings. And let them be the decision maker in terms of them hopping aboard that journey.“

Putting people first

People are also at the heart of the data strategy at WPP, which goes far beyond infrastructure to focus on enabling people. But with technology evolving at pace, how is it possible to plan ahead for a future that is difficult to predict?

“I think it's about taking a very forward thinking yet balanced view on how to change, and then knowing that change is always a constant,” Vip answers.

“The world of technology is moving rapidly. It's being accepting of that, and adapting to that as well.

“We're not putting everything into a particular change, a particular delivery or a solution. It's about knowing that what you might build today, there might be a better way of doing tomorrow, and embracing that rather than resenting it. But also taking a view in terms of ‘What does the forward view look like in the world of technology?’

“We're now in the world of AI and people are talking about AGI – Artificial General Intelligence. There are things like humanoids being tried and tested.

“It's trying to understand what innovations are potentially in the pipeline, how they might impact what you're striving to deliver, but being very open to that change as well.

“Whilst we want the users of our technology and the things that we create to be adaptive to what we put out there, we have that same duty upon ourselves to adapt to that world around us as well – understand it, and embrace it, and live and breathe change.”

Being agile may be key, but it can come with financial risk as well as the potential for reward. Getting agreement for investment in technology that may be superseded by something more powerful or effective within a relatively short period of time must come with its challenges. How is Vip managing this?

“It's trying to effectively build the case around the level of competitive advantage that might give us – sometimes in the short term and sometimes in the medium to long term – trying to draw out the distinction around what that means for us and the benefit that it will create,” he explains.

“The things that we sometimes overlook are the other fringe opportunities. There might be a way of introducing something that might help our colleagues become a little bit more efficient. That might be something that we might be able to package and potentially sell to clients. Or there might be opportunities to advise clients around their journey.

“So, trying to embrace it but also understand where the commercial advantages will exist.”

Collaborating to create advantage

One of the areas where Vip is embracing both technology and a collaborative approach is through the innovative ‘Chat with your Data’ project.

He and his team are working on this with key partners including ServiceNow (WPP’s data catalogue provider) and Sightly (for AI powered real-time cultural intelligence).

The project began after ServiceNow published a whitepaper which explored using a large language model with a knowledge graph to answer questions more accurately. Vip wanted to put this into practice.

They first looked to make large language models more conversant with contextual paths, or pieces of information or applications, with the objective that people would be able to ask questions via natural language inputs to get an answer back.

Vip explains, “We've been building this out and we're almost complete with rolling it out. With going through that process, we’ve realised that human interfacing that data, which was the primary objective, is great. But there's another opportunity in allowing applications and services to interface with that data. There's also an opportunity here to integrate systems and platforms using AI to these services as well.

“We’ve stopped and thought ‘How do we get systems talking to our data, as well as our people talking to the data?’”

He continues, “We're looking at other interfaces that are part of people's workflows. So, people might be trying to ideate or brainstorm with other people digitally. How can we bridge that gap so insights are coming into that process, rather than people having to navigate away to another screen to get something and then bring it back in? We're thinking about how we bring those insights a little bit more closer to people's ways of working.

“We've now got a very strong approach. We’ve got a much broader team doing this and the investment behind it to make that happen. We're on track to getting this rolled out very early next year.”

Being part of this forward-thinking project is not only interesting because of what’s being achieved, but because of the opportunity for close collaboration between his team and the teams at ServiceNow and Sightly. Vip is a builder and a collaborator at heart, so bringing together a group of people to achieve something like this plays to his strengths.

“It helps realise the power of collaboration. This is a collective journey where we need not only our collective expertise, but our collective capabilities to be able to achieve this goal,” Vip says.

“Everyone has a distinctive role to play in this. Yes, there's a vision and we need to go away and formulate the strategy and, ultimately, the delivery plan of how we get to that. But this is something that we all input in, that we all live and breathe and that we all benefit from, because we're all doing something that's unique and arguably pioneering too. Everyone benefits in that way.”

Vip talks about the power of having people from these companies pulling together to achieve this, “It’s fantastic having a group of diverse people. While we talk about technology a lot, it's having people with diverse experiences, diverse skill sets, diverse abilities and so on that really ensures we're engineering something that is fit for the future.

“Having strong relationships with organisations who we deem as partners and also folk in our own network is important. Being able to tap into their expertise, to be able to have conversations where you can share ideas and walk away with some learnings is really, really important. You've got to be talking and engaging all the time.”

Curiosity, creativity & failing

Collaboration isn’t the only thing that’s important to Vip when it comes to transformation. Curiosity and creativity play a key part too.

“Just because something is great today, it could be good tomorrow and mediocre the day after. I think it's very important to be curious about how you could make something better, what might threaten it or might make something less effective than what it is.”

But, Vip reflects, “It's one thing being curious and trying to understand more. It's another thing to be creative thereafter.”

The realities of experimentation, prototyping and building is something that Vip thinks should be shared, “I think it's something that we don't often talk about when I'm having conversations with peers in the industry. We talk about the great things that we've done in terms of ‘We've done X and it meant Y’, but we don't talk about that journey where we go from curiosity to being quite creative to sometimes actually failing.

“Because sometimes we'll go down a path or fall down a rabbit hole and then realise, well, actually that's not quite right – or it works, but it doesn't work in a way which it should.

“I think something we should be doing as leaders more often is talking about not only the successes but also our failures, because that's part of the process.”

Has failure played a part in getting Vip to where he is today? “I feel as though I've learned a lot just through failure. Someone once said to me, and this really stuck with me, “I've never lost. I've always learned.””

Vip continues, “The more that we share about those failures, the more we can learn from others without having to potentially make those mistakes or fall down those rabbit holes ourselves.”

“This is where having circles of trusted folks that you can engage with and share these things with in a very candid way is really, really important, I think. But I also think when we're looking at future generations and their ways of working, it's something that we should be instilling in them too.

“It's not always about the great results, the shiny things that you create and the great case studies and success stories that come from it. Behind it is lots of pain, lots of failure, sometimes lots of cost, but we don't often see that. “We should be OK with failure, just as we are with success.”

Tech vs objective

Being curious and creative plays into Vip’s position of ‘Don’t start with the technology as the answer, start with the problem or opportunity.’ In other words, think about what you’re trying to solve and then figure out what technology you need to solve it, rather than wanting to use a technology for the sake of it.

Emerging tools can be exciting yet distracting, so how is this mindset of focusing on the problem first being embedded across teams?

Vip says, “It's constantly grounding people into the objective or the outcome that we're here for. It's all too easy for people to get kind of fixated on the shiny new tools, tech, ways of working, new processes, new buttons – whatever it might be – and I think it's something that we all default to. We find something new and then we want to make use for it.

“Start with the objective. Make sure that you're really grounded in that. And the answer doesn't have to be AI or a tech, sometimes it's process engineering and sometimes it can just be use of very lightweight AI or some lightweight data.”

Throughout the process, Vip is always mindful of the ‘So what?’ question. “Through the conversations that you have and through the guidance that you give, it's always asking, ‘How do we do this better, quicker or more efficiently,’ or whatever it might be. It's always about getting to that outcome and being laser focused on it throughout.”

Vip points out, “It takes human skill to be able to understand and ask those objective questions.”

Cultivating anentrepreneurial energy

With human input still key, fostering a sense of experimentation within WPP’s data function is important to their continued progression. We asked Vip how he achieves this.

He shares, “I think there's two things here. Firstly, you've got to make capabilities available to people, because there's lots of tools, technologies, and services. Make them available and then people will experiment and they'll try new things.

“Giving them great – even competitive – reasons to be able to flex those skills and those tools and services is also key.

“We've run a number of hackathons over the years where we will give people a particular objective which is centred around the use of a tool or a technology or a particular set of data or insights. We want people to work with others that they haven't worked with before across disciplines: a cross-functional group of people with different skill sets and capabilities.

“And have some kind of reward, something that is attainable to them that is not something that they would normally be able to get – whether it's getting the recognition from senior leaders or the ability to showcase this in front of a broader group of people.”

Vip feels that what is important in these situations isn’t only access to technology or the ability to have fun and learn at the same time, it’s also the opportunity for face-to-face human engagement instead of communicating through technology.

Vip points out, “You still need to talk to people. You still need to engage with people. Technology sometimes drives us away from that level of human engagement, understanding and reasoning.

It's crucial because it forms the foundation for achieving our goals. Without it, our objectives remain out of reach.

“We are the glue, we are the drivers of all of this change and without us human beings, we can't make any of that happen.”

He continues, “I think it’s always important to come back to that human element because we dehumanise a lot of things in the future world because we think we have the answers for it in a systemic and technological way, and it’s not always the case.

“I think it's really, really important for us to be part of that loop and part of that engineering process as well.

“One thing I've heard over the years is the statement around, ‘AI is going to take our jobs’ or ‘It's a threat’. I don't think it is. I think it's just around the way in which we adapt to using technology. Humans are always going to be part of that technological loop and we're always going to be the driver.”

Vip uses an example here to explain his point, “When you look at the taxi industry, which has arguably been revolutionised by Uber, it still needs someone to say, “Here's where I am and here's where I want to go”. It still needs someone to actually make that happen.”

When he thinks about technology and the future, he continues, “It's important to have the mindset of ‘How do I adapt? How do I seize those opportunities? Where do I need to brush up on some skills – learn a little bit more about new ways of doing things?’ I think it's exciting for humankind moving forward.”

And with that, we look forward to seeing how Vip’s focus on collaboration and using new technology to meet objectives drives innovation at WPP.