As regards business development, I personally feel that LISA could be more overt as a forum for business contacts, rather than interpreting the (attractive) idea of "coopetition" as "leaving your business development interests at the door while we talk common technical issues". I would rather interpret "coopetition" in the spirit of Alex McDonnell's (IDOC) excellent presentation in Vienna (LISA Forum, July 1995), where he stressed that competition on today's localization market is less between companies than between product chains. Meaning that one company can be in competition with another in one production chain, and can cooperate with the same company in another chain. In our complex localization world, where our individual skills need to be combined in many different ways for many different customer requirements, I think LISA could provide a "project information centre and service exchange" as an active contribution to its members' business development. The Showcase is definitely a major step in this direction, and must count as one of LISA's most significant achievements to date.

Tool development has been a sluggish topic, mainly I suppose because of those wide-ranging requirements of industry players and the difficulty of compressing those requirements into usable specifications. Our own approach to the tool problem is now less to specify and build our own than to look to the specialist software market and see what is on offer. Of course, when we get the opportunity to express our requirements, we do so; but I feel there is more drive to tool development projects when it is a matter of a tool manufacturer responding to the needs of his potential customers. If he doesn't come up with a product, he doesn't eat, whereas if a SIG doesn't come up with a specification, it simply postpones the issue till the next meeting. This is not to say that SIG efforts are laudable and should not continue, but it might be a better approach to find project sponsors and establish a project goal, budget and team, perhaps with a view to coming up with a commercial product which would recoup costs and even generate a profit…?

On the subject of QA, SNI SprachenDienst recently expended a good deal of effort on its ISO 9001 certification, so that industry- standardized QA procedures would now require an additional adaptation effort. Nonetheless, it may be worthwhile to put in that effort if the LISA QA Model manages to establish itself as the sine qua non for the localization industry. Of more interest to us, I think, would be the common bidding platform, as we, presumably like many others, are in the position of having to rethink our quotation structures for every new customer, who himself has usually gone to the trouble of drawing up an elaborate questionnaire to try and funnel diverse supplier information into a set of comparable packages. It starts from converting cents per word into DM per line into pounds per 1000 words and goes on from there…When you think about it (and we do at SNI!), a lot of industry time must go into this, which it would be worthwhile saving. A LISA common bidding platform would go a long way towards restoring sanity, but here again, time is of the essence. So I wonder here too whether the path of sponsors->goal->budget->team->product might not be a better approach than the honorary efforts of a SIG.

Davis Lewis
Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG
Otto-Hahn-Ring 6
D-81739 München
Germany
Tel: +49 89 636 40086
Fax: +49 89 636 40485
David. Lewis@mch.sni.de