Ipsos| Dr Ben Booth

Ipsos is one of the world's largest market research and polling companies, with annual revenue of €700m and 7,000 staff in 44 countries. The company expanded in 2005 with the acquisition of UK polling firm Mori for €128.5m as part of a strategy to boost its UK presence. Dr Ben Booth was IT director at Mori at the time of the acquisition and has since been made global CTO of the Ipsos group. In this CIO Visions interview Ben talks to silicon.com about the IT challenges of a merger and acquisition and how new technologies are transforming the market research industry…

Andy McCue: You were head of IT at the famous UK polling company Mori at the time global market research company Ipsos made a €128.5m acquisition bid. What did the company look to you for at that time and what were your priorities?

Dr Ben Booth: During the pre-acquisition phase the main focus, naturally, was on due diligence. So the acquiring business Ipsos were wanting to find out as much as they could about our operation in general, and IT being an important part of that. So they wanted to know what systems we had and so on and they also wanted to know the salaries of those and also quite a lot about the contractual basis to make sure we owned all the things we claimed to own. But fortunately because we'd had a round of investor funding just over a year before we were able to dust that off and not spend too much time on the routine things. Rather more we could concentrate on added value, what the particular skills, techniques, technologies and our people that we could bring to the deal.

Andy McCue: That acquisition completed in 2005 and you became the global CTO of the whole Ipsos group. What were your priorities coming into that role and what advice would you give to other CIOs involved in that whole M&A process?

Dr Ben Booth: Well, I should say first I spent about six months as European CTO before taking the global role. But, I think the advice I'd give is firstly to be client-focused, to understand firstly what your external clients are looking for because that's going to be what drives business and drives technology. Secondly, I think in taking on a broad role like that I would advise, if you like, a consultative approach. You need to get to meet people to find out what they do, to find out what particular skills there are because in a large organisation there will be a lot of people with lots to bring to the party but they may well be working in a country or region far away from headquarters and perhaps without being acknowledged for doing that. So I would advise look at the business priorities and understand your resources then develop your forward plan to fit with that.

Andy McCue: And presumably there's an element of uncertainty in that whole M&A process?

Dr Ben Booth: Very much so and I think we were all, and myself included, quite anxious about what might happen. I think the key thing there really is to reassure people where you can and really to look at the process of being acquired as an opportunity rather than a threat. I think for the majority of us we've found our jobs have got bigger and more interesting, so there are many positives to it. But my advice really would be work with your colleagues around the business, be open because there will be lots of people coming to see you, lots of people with ideas about how things should be done, lots of drivers from different aspects of the client-facing business and also the technology leaders as well. So, really be open to those things.

Andy McCue: To many people Mori's obviously most famous for its election polling and predicting who is going to be the new government. What are the challenges of that?

Dr Ben Booth: Election work for market researchers or polling companies is the most challenging because there is an absolute right answer. When an election is declared if you've got it right that's fine. If you've missed by a per cent or two you probably suggested the wrong party would be in power and that's different to most other aspects of research where you're getting trends rather than absolute numbers. It's very challenging from the point of view of the methodology, the statistics and so on. It's also challenging from the point of view of the utter reliability of what you're doing. You only have one shot at it so really even the most business critical of systems usually can accept a moderate amount of downtime but you can't have downtime during a general election so you have your full business continuity set up. You have your real system, your back-up and probably your back-up back-up and you have to be prepared for every eventuality and for every combination of things going wrong several times. And then you have to have your people who have to be really on the ball because they'll be making all that work but also they'll probably be working for 24 hours or 48 hours with very little time to eat or sleep or do anything other than running the process. So it's extremely demanding. It's very exciting and interesting. You tend to get, whether it's a party political thing or something more popular we've just done a music festival in Italy for instance is another similarly demanding exercise where you are under the media spotlight. It has to work perfectly on the night so it's exciting but very demanding.

Andy McCue: The Ipsos Group currently has revenues of around €700m a year and is aiming to pass the €1bn mark this year. What are the business priorities for the group and how does that tie in to your IT strategy?

Dr Ben Booth: Well really just to briefly pick up on another aspect of the acquisition is to not forget your new owners will be looking for synergies, so there will doubtless be some savings that can be made and we were able to do that particularly with our external suppliers. We were able to negotiate better contracts using the global business as leverage. We were able to get generally better service and cheaper delivery as well. The main business challenges in the research sector now are focused around what our clients are looking for. That's certainly in terms of quicker delivery of research results. It's in terms of much better ways of them actually receiving it. In the old days research tended to be delivered in the wheelbarrow full of paper tables. Now it's much more likely to be delivered in a PowerPoint presentation or a manipulable database with some tools to do that. So, delivery is important. There are a lot of new methodologies for data collection. Online has been around for a long time but there are all sorts of clever things you can do to measure advertising and marketing impact. One of the more interesting ones we're experimenting with is having people carrying GPS devices with them where they go and where they come in sight of a particular advertising hoarding, for instance, and things like that. So they are looking for novel ways of data collection, they're looking for novel ways of analysis, they're looking for quick delivery and, of course, they're also looking to drive down costs as well and we have to be both innovating, driving excellence but also doing things as cheaply as possible as well.

Andy McCue: How is Ipsos using IT to innovate, build new capabilities, differentiate and gain competitive advantage?

Dr Ben Booth: Well we're using it right through the research process from our data collection which, as I said, could be some automated process where its people carrying a GPS device around or some other sort of measuring tool, it could be through a survey conducted onto a handheld PC or a tablet, it could be through some sort of automated data collection device. Then we're doing a lot of different things with our statistical analysis, and then its out to how we deliver to our clients and also how we integrate data from a number of different sources. Again that's part and parcel of the total mix. It's part of the research process from end to end.

Andy McCue: What new technologies and trends are having or have the potential to impact on your business in the future?

Dr Ben Booth: The trend we are seeing - well obviously there are some new technologies for collection, analysis and delivery - but the big trend we're seeing is, if you like, in the overall model of research. Our global clients are expecting to have their research conducted globally and therefore a lot of what we do now is to do with databases and bringing data together. What we and our other major competitors have is a huge body of normative data, which we've collected over the years about our clients and about our sectors. So we're able to bring to bear…lets say you're doing an employee survey. If you're doing survey in, let's say, media we will know that some of the sort of questions you ask, let's say 'are you happy with your general situation'? In some sectors the norm will be very high and in some sectors it may be very low. But if you don't know that, if you don't have that normative data then there's very little value to the survey. We can bring together the global data for a particular client. Let's say someone like P&G, for instance, who will be operating in just about every market in the world. We'll bring together the data from all of those sources and then we'll be able to, where appropriate, use the norms on that when we're aggregating the data. There's a lot of exciting technologies for collection and delivery but there's also a lot of fairly heavyweight statistics and analysis goes in as well.

Andy McCue: Ben, thank you very much.