Özgur

I am an Operational Director for Kantar in Turkey. In general, I give my colleagues what they need to work on their functions. I enable people to do their jobs better.

We provide data to our clients that is split up into different parts. I provide combined services for this function. What we do is bring data and client services together.

One of our main functions is project management. For example, for a product project, we get the client requirements and we prepare the proper interfaces to get the data. We might change the data collection method and create an interface for clients to access the data. It might be a face-to-face data collection or an observation. The data facilitation team will set up the right way of collecting data.

One of the best projects I've worked on was the merger of Millward Brown and TNS under one brand, Kantar. When I arrived, we had two different research, data and fieldwork teams sitting at the same place, working in the same operations group, but working very differently and separately. To create one team, I split the project into two parts. First, I had to have a look into the technical difficulties, and after that into the cultural differences. There was a hierarchical structure in decision making originally, which I managed to change to a horizontal network for decision making. This increased the impact of technical knowledge of each team in our jobs. Then we all focused on benefits that we can get from diversity.

Finally we have one big operations team working together! Working together with people who have deeper knowledge on their functional areas, disciplines, specialities, and a broader knowledge outside of their core area, which significantly decreased the inefficiency and mistakes in our daily work. Being a part of the noticeable change in our division's productivity and profitability is the most exciting impact we have seen as a result of what we achieved in operations together in the past 2 years.

I love learning, and have worked in all different parts of research in big matrix organisations. What I consider a big part of my career is really understanding consumer research and supporting it with data collection systems.

Joining Kantar I learned you have lots of different ways to collect data, and this provided me with the possibility to see each cog in the system moving on its own. A great overview. Kantar is in the right place technology wise to move forward. We have the correct landscape to move forward and to support our clients in any way. I am optimistic about the future because I am aligned with Kantar's vision.