BrazilDogma Alares promotes Oguz Kartal to partner
Istanbul-based consultancy Dogma Alares has promoted design expert Oğuz Kartal to partner – now leading a team of eight professionals and advising clients in the vibrant space of service design.
Kartal joined Dogma Alares in July last year, and within six months was handed the mantle for the service design department. A team of eight – including former design experts from global innovation consultancy Fjord – has since been advising clients under his charge as managing director.
He now makes the step up to partner – cementing a successful relationship with Dogma Alares. Reflecting on his progress, he lauded the firm’s multidimensional approach to consulting – a meeting point for strategy, service design, digital technologies and artificial intelligence. For him, the proposition is unrivalled in Turkey and the region, and presents a significant opportunity.
“We try to serve in 360 degrees at Dogma Alares. Clients come us with questions about either how to realise an idea into a product or how to make an existing one better. Mere design is not a sufficient answer. Mere infrastructure or software implementation also does not suffice; they all must work together,” he said in an interview on Medium.
The approach is strongly aligned with Kartal’s evolved ethos on design. A banker by background, his first contact with design came at Turkish telecom giant Turkcell – where he was leading his own Digital Centre of Excellence within six years.
He has since held a number of lead roles: managing IBM’s digital customer experience strategy in Turkey; heading IBM’s design studio; and leading design and digital customer experience at the National Bank of Kuwait. His core learning through years of work is that design belongs at the heart of strategy.
Service design for him is “a collection of approaches for designing a service or a product from scratch by putting users to the centre or solving users’ problems while converting them into new opportunities by focusing on the experience.” He uses Apple as an example of the few businesses that put customer experience at the core of design.
Designing the future
Unfortunately, design lacks a seat at the strategy table for most businesses globally – a scenario that is gradually transforming as differentiating value of customer experience comes to light. With the current climate of changing consumer preferences and fierce competition, this realisation will likely be turbocharged.
In Dogma Alares, Kartal has found a forward-looking advisory firm that puts service design at the same level as strategy and digital transformation. Agile methodologies such as design thinking, for instance, have pride of place at Dogma Alares – where customer problems are solved through a continuous and iterative process of prototyping and testing.
Kartal steps up to partner at a time when his team has recently doubled in size, bolstered with a number of fresh graduates. “We create an environment where one can learn the foundations of strategy development from a strategy consultant, the logic of software design and development from a software developer, or what data science, artificial intelligence and analytics can do using available data from a machine learning engineer,” he concluded.
