Over the last decade especially, the GILT industry has benefited from the ideas and outlook of people joining us from other business sectors, along with graduates of the world's business schools. Yet somehow, we have yet to really acquire the facility to easily communicate with the strategic decisionmakers as do our colleagues from other sectors. This isn't "rocket science." We just need some helpful guidance and not-so-gentle pushing to develop our vocabulary so that we can start conversing.

One place to start is with developing a vocabulary and some models for ROI (return on investment) assessment within our industry. In Defining and Measuring the 'R' and the 'I', we take a look at ROI from the perspective of the GILT industry and suggest some initial steps to successfully define and measure a simple ROI. At the same time, we can learn a valuable lesson from our IT colleagues, who are masters at ROI assessments, by understanding that the real value of these exercises lies in the collaboration between ROI team members. As more and more of the right stakeholders throughout our various organizations help us to determine what can be measured and how, we will all learn to better communicate as we "walk in one another's shoes."

The purpose of this article is to foster discussion and to encourage the sharing of different ROI models/formulas among LISA members. If you are willing to share how your company and/or clients approach and calculate ROI, please do so by sending your feedback directly to editor@lisa.org.

And what is LISA’s role in all of this? We believe that Gunther Höser, Managing Director of WH&P, has expressed it well:
“LISA has a role to play in establishing ROI guidelines for the industry. It can help to clarify the debate by informing the industry about the need to calculate ROI form localization and developing objective calculation standards/”

ROI is just one component of many used in building business cases for entering new markets and localizing into new languages. In our premium content article, Focus on the Swan - Not the Ugly Duckling!, John White of 1-for-All Marketing shares tips from his experience persuading decisionmakers to concentrate on the "elegant swan," i.e., the profits to be had from lucrative international markets, rather than on the "ugly duckling," i.e., the investment required to generate these profits. As with ROI analysis, he reminds us that the key to building a successful business case lies in teamwork with colleagues both inside and outside of our organizations.

We are also very pleased to republish in Japanese an article that just appeared in this month's issue of the JTF (Japan Translation Federation) Journal in Japan. Mr. Hiroyuki Kamijou, one of Japan's best-known translators, shares his overview of the LISA Forum Europe 2002 in Heidelberg, Germany.

We want to draw your attention to a new publication available from IBM, for it is proof that progress is being made: globalization can be integrated into an organization's business practices rather than retrofitted. In the newly published IBM e-Business Globalization Solution Design Guide, the authors state that globalization has become an architecture, rather than just an add-on value, in the realm of eBusiness. The key to this globalization architecture in software is the single executable, for which the publication provides a model, a working example and a set of methodologies.

The results of the Global eBusiness Survey, done in conjunction with OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), will be available to the public next week. Our findings certainly support the statement that globalization is indeed becoming an architecture in eBusiness. With 90% of the respondents to this survey reporting that they provide an information portal and 76% stating that they provide these portals in two or more languages, it is clear that globalization can no longer be "just an add-on value." Individual sections of the survey cover types of transactions conducted, standards and localization technology.

In other news on the survey front, LISA is joining with Larsen g11n Ltd. to conduct a new survey in the area of salaries for GILT professionals. You can check out the survey here and read an interview with Inger Larsen, one of the survey's architects.

Don't forget this week... cooperate and collaborate!