Business as usual (BAU) is growing and thriving, one panellist said at this year’s Linedata conference in London.
In a panel on the growth of transformation, the panellist added: “The way we organise ourselves and operate as an industry is going to be focused on thinking about the transformative growth over the next 12 months.”
The panellist elaborated: “The way in which we need to approach this is to put the clients at the centre of innovation—there is no better voice than a client's voice.”
“It’s a leap of faith in doing so, but you have got to be the internal disruptor to drive change in a programme”, the panellist explained.
The moderator asked how transformation can work successfully.
To this question, one panellist said: “There needs to be a major transformation in the way major organisations operate. It’s about evolution and constantly looking forward and outward.”
“It is not just the leadership team that needs to do this but the whole team. They need to be gathering information and feeding it back into the system, so that there is constant tweaks and constant changes”, the panellist advised.
In terms of growth, one speaker said: “To be blunt, growth for us is selling more and we have to see what the industry is doing in order to see what the consumer wants to buy. This needs to be done through a wider group engaging with each other and coming up with ideas, and that is what makes the next product launch interesting.”
Many in the industry say that regulation stifles growth and innovation, one speaker noted, and many find it difficult to manage the gigantic volume of data.
“We try to help organisations manage that data and find better ways in doing so—a lot of that process is manual. I see technology as an enabler. We think that it is necessary for agencies to grow and transform themselves,” the panellist added.
Technology was a key theme of the panel and the panellist asked the audience how they use technology best in the context towards people.
“One of the problems with productivity in the UK is that we are not letting people embrace technology fully in the workplace”, one speaker said.
Some companies are preventing people from doing this, for security reasons mainly, but we need to find a way around this. They need to be given the freedom. There is an amazing amount of collaboration tools at the moment.”
Concluding the panel, the moderator asked for predictions about the next three to five years within the industry. One panellist said that they expect to see a continued increase in regulations.
Another panellist replied: “I think the biggest change will be the digitisation of interaction, for example, asset managers and their clients.”
