WPP

Please share with our readers your key roles and responsibilities in the organization.

My key responsibility is to plan, design and implement cloud strategy at the group level within our organization. WPP is not just a single company but a group of companies. It is one of the most complex organizations I have ever worked in, with a highly federated model. WPP has great capabilities and has a multitude of fantastic people doing fascinating work and our goal at the center is to harmonize and simplify the execution of these capabilities. We aim to build high-quality and standardized capabilities that can easily be consumed by people. That's what we do to empower our teams at the edges of the operating companies to be successful. On a day-to-day basis, my responsibility spans from involvement in operational issues that require escalation and support to strategic works where migrating over 10,000 workloads on-premise and private locations worldwide into the public cloud. The range of my responsibilities varies quite dramatically, allowing me to tackle a diverse set of challenges and projects.

How do you think the pandemic has affected the industry?

I find the pandemic to be quite an interesting phenomenon because during the pandemic there was a shift toward remote working while ensuring a smooth functioning of operations. During this time, we initiated the development of a transformation program. However, like many others, we too have not been immune to the economic impacts. Since last year, there has been a noticeable shift in priorities, where driving value and efficiency was the focus. Across industries, we are executing plans and returning value back to the business as well as streamlining operations and achieving scalability as quickly as possible. And it is quite a dramatic shift as most plans and programs throughout the industry had multi-year horizons. So I think these were some of the impacts bought by the pandemic.

What are some of the technology adoption challenges you have noticed in the organization?

The change management aspect at WPP is truly remarkable. What is interesting in WPP is that there is no unified understanding of the cloud. This is mainly because we are not a single company but we are thousands of companies together. So within the business, we have individuals who possess extensive knowledge and experience in cloud technology, while there are other teams who have no particular interest in it. So finding a balance among these diverse perspectives is quite challenging. At WPP, we run as mode one, mode two, and mode three organizations concurrently. We don't follow the typical pattern of individuals moving from mode one to mode two and eventually to mode three in a sequential manner. To ensure that mode three individuals can operate effectively, guardrails must be established to support their expertise and knowledge. However, we also need to prevent any accidental extravagant expenditures, such as spinning up a GPU cluster with a thousand nodes and spending millions of dollars a day.

"Across industries, a sense of urgency in executing plans and returning value back to the business as well as streamlining operations and achieving scalability is widely noticed"

Can you share some of the latest initiatives implemented in your organization?

Currently, there are numerous initiatives underway at WPP. One prime example is the cloud acceleration program. We have made significant progress in areas of fewer complexities and simple applications and we made this progress through agile methodology. As an organization, we generally adopt a waterfall delivery approach for delivering enterprise-scale applications and services. Given that we have over a thousand plus organizations, it is crucial to ensure that when new capabilities are introduced, they are mature and easy to use. However, in agile methodology, we need not be concerned about maturity as the emphasis is on delivery cadence.

We have blended capabilities from both platform engineering teams and product-driven organizations. So cloud workloads are treated as products, which is different from managing on-premises workloads. In our experience, combining both cloud and on-premise is successful but requires coaching, training, and helping individuals to understand that operating in the cloud does not require the same level of concern as on-premises operations.

What are some of the trends you envision in the next 12- 24 months?

I believe there are two aspects to consider: growth and cost base. The growth side focuses on growing a business securely while the cost base focuses on reducing costs out of operation. The industry is moving from traditional commercial software to cloud open sources as it causes relatively less maintenance charge. Leveraging AI and ML is another aspect of the trend. We are actively exploring the benefits while maintaining corporate governance and respecting the interests of our customers, colleagues, and end users. I believe it will take time to address the regulatory and legislative concerns that inevitably arise with any new technology. I also believe there is further more study to be done around moving computing from the center to the edge. Companies like CloudFlare and Akamai offer interesting options, enabling them to optimize performance and provide a better user experience.

What is your piece of advice to your fellow peers?

My piece of advice is, that for a successful transformation a secure and motivated sponsor is necessary to drive the program. And in our case, we are fortunate to have a team backed by a strong leader fully invested in driving transformation. I believe continuous selling is crucial. We must consistently communicate and demonstrate the value and benefits of cloud and digital transformation programs and it is also vital to maintain a regular cadence of communication. It is important to share feedback with partners and It's important to remember that they are always in a sales cycle with us. The paucity of communication can always hinder progress.