The localization vendor community has notched up well over a decade of experience in working out good practices for delivering globalization, localization and translation services to a broad range of client organizations. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that, apart from the information technology sector, the localization strategies of client organizations have not benefited to the same degree from the spread of this sometimes arcane knowledge and understanding about content globalization.

In response to this challenge, a group of leading localization vendors and consultants, concerned to both learn from and educate their own globalization clients, formed a consortium to carry out a project called EEEL (for Excellence in European eContent Localisation) for partial funding by the European Commission’s eContent program www.cordis.lu/econtent in late 2001. EEEL has since become the flagship project for this 60 million euro, market-focused program, dedicated to funding innovative, multi-country projects addressing content localization issues under the tag line, “Enhancing content production in a multilingual and multicultural environment.”

Cooking up EEEL

EEEL is dedicated to documenting and sharing knowledge about Best Practice in electronic content globalization/localization across a number of industries. The project has been going on for eighteen months, and has now reached the stage of raising public awareness about its results. This article is intended to share with the localization community some of the findings of EEEL, with the hope that others may be interested in contributing to and relaying this body of industry-focused knowledge beyond the circle of insiders and out to the buyers of globalization and localization services in different industrial and business sectors.

EEEL is lead-managed by IBM Business Services Belgium, and includes representatives from localization solution vendors Bowne, GlobalSight, Hitext, Idiom, SDL and Xerox, each of whom has been working with some of their own customers on globalization and localization projects. The ultimate objective is to synthesize the results of these fact-finding missions and distill from them a ‘model’ of Best Practice in localization that can act as an industry benchmark for anyone wishing to undertake similar globalization projects.

The project is highly collaborative and consensus-seeking. As well as including actors from the localization industry, it has links to other interested networks via LISA, via the management education associations, Confederation of European Management Schools (www.cems.org), AMBA (Association of MBAs, www.mba.org.uk) and ABS (Association of Business Schools, www.the-abs.org.uk) and the industry links (through membership, sponsorship, etc.) of all of these stakeholders.

Five Stages

Despite the existence of a multitude of case studies and a vast amount of anecdotal rule of thumb, no one has attempted to formalize available knowledge on localization and globalization into publicly available statements of Best Practice that would allow a new entrant - or a new content globalization project - to measure itself against industry benchmarks. The hope is that EEEL’s original findings in this area will contribute towards further community-centric knowledge sharing among content publishers of all stripes, and pave the way towards more sophisticated awareness of business excellence in localization.

EEEL’s work covers five stages:

1. brainstorming, during which the consortium worked out a set of common statements about the key parameters of comprehensive enterprise localization processes in order to provide a common backbone to case study work.
2. fieldwork, which consisted of documenting current globalization practice in a number of major enterprises through wide-ranging, in-depth interviews. The results have been then synthesized into twenty or so case studies that are being web published for reference (www.eeel-online.com). These case studies cover globalization or localization projects in organizations such as DAF Trucks, eBank, Sony Information Technology Europe, Alcatel, Fluke and Adobe. They address different categories of content, business models, degree of engagement with e-publishing and e-business, etc. to provide a description of a broad range of approaches to e-content localization issues. The goal was to provide comparative information usable by any European organization facing the business challenges of cross-language and cross-cultural communication.
3. model building. During this stage, the findings of the case studies were leveraged to build an ELMA (eContent Localization Maturity Assessment) model that provides a tool for benchmarking an organization’s capacity to localize efficiently. This model covers both qualitative measures and quantitative return-on-investment metrics and can be used by a wide range of organizations. It is designed to be used by any organization wishing to launch localization projects, or by consultants and suppliers who wish to help their own customers plan their localization strategies and projects.
4. building common understanding. The aim here is to expand the reach of the stakeholder community engaged in e-content localization issues to encompass all kinds of content owners and publishers, including commercial content publishers, corporate content owners, and services that provide platforms for the distribution of content. The intention is to jointly develop a shared set of values and concepts that will improve the ability of e-content publishers to communicate about and exploit Best Practice. The project’s ultimate goal is to work towards a common understanding of processes and standards for effective adaptation of e-content for multiple cultures and markets in order to promote maximum marketplace interconnectivity.
5. spreading the word. The final months of the project are being devoted to properly informing a wide range of stakeholders about EEEL’s results. There is ample evidence of a deficit in common ‘user’ understanding of what is really at stake in localization in many content-intensive industries, especially when it comes to measuring returns on investment, specifying and managing processes or taking advantage of fast-evolving Web demographics.

The ELMA Model

ELMA provides an original contribution to enhancing business understanding of localization process decisions. To make it quite clear how the various parts of this project are articulated, EEEL has defined and documented Best Practice (the first two stages listed above) and in stage three – ELMA – is delivering a tool that will allow an organization to measure the degree to which it has achieved Best Practice in localization.

In other words, in any given case, ELMA will be able to measure how far an organization has advanced along the road towards the best practices initially documented in the EEEL project. The content of ELMA – questionnaires and databases - is also being implemented in a Web-services based software tool (see below) to simplify the maturity measurement process, and at the same time, to enrich the database of comparative information about practices within a given industry or type of company (automotive, software, pharma, financial, etc).

The ELMA model can measure conformity with localization Best Practice by documenting corporate or organizational approaches to the following seven Topics, organized into two interacting categories:

• Business objectives
  • Markets
  • Content
• Measurement
  • Process
  • Technology
  • Organization

The basic idea is that if an organization knows what its business objectives are, knows what drives its market and what its locale priorities are, and has an explicit content strategy, then it can put a process in place, supported by appropriate technology and architecture, and staffed by suitably organized resources. It can then measure the contribution of its process / technology / organization implementation to achieving its business objectives. All of these latter topics can be quantitatively measured for return on investment.

From a content publisher’s perspective, the model can be visualized as this set of seven Topics, each of which comprises a number of Issues. With each Issue is associated a number of Best Practice Statements (60 in all) that help a content publisher validate progress towards the desired localization goal. The model also supplies a set of questions (180 in all) to explore the level of best practice maturity on any given Issue.

Here is an example of how the Markets topic is represented in the ELMA model.

Topic: Markets

Issues: Requirements assessment, Branding and Competition, Prioritization of markets for localization.

What we want to achieve:

• A complete understanding of how the needs of our markets drive our content localization plan, and how to prioritize regions, locales and languages.

How we plan to achieve it:

• Analyze each target locale and validate local market needs and constraints.
• Assess how our content localization plan is driven by and will affect our competitive positioning.
• Systematically evaluate the significance of different locales and languages to set localization priorities.
• Etc.

Anyone using the ELMA model to assess its localization maturity can then drill down beneath each issue to access the Best Practice (BP) statements associated with it, and a questionnaire that will extract data to assign it a maturity level score with respect to Best Practice statements for a particular Topic. Typical drill-downs for the three Issues in the Market Topic look like this:

In ELMA, then, each Topic is expressed as a series of statements that describe what EEEL has deduced or posited as Best Practice for some aspect of the localization business decision process. An organization can consult the model and measure its current status with respect to one or more of these given statements. If ELMA assesses the current position of a company without much experience of localization as uncomfortably remote from conformity with these Best Practice statements, then that company can work systematically through the questions linked to the Issue at hand via an interview with an expert (a business consultant or localization professional) to determine the required remedial action.

The ELMA Diagnostic Tool

To provide fuller support to organizations assessing their localization maturity assessment, a prototype ELMA diagnostic tool is being designed for localization practitioners, vendors, consultants and others. Its main functionalities are a questionnaire that helps to assess an organization’s maturity in Content Localization, and a central knowledge database with comparative data originating from the questionnaires. ELMA grows more useful the more it is used, since users automatically enrich the database with their own (anonymous) data.

The ELMA tool will consist of three parts:

1. a web platform
2. a Smart .Net client
3. a web service

A given organization will register with the ELMA tool via a Web service available on a dedicated Web site. Since confidentiality is an essential ingredient to the success of the tool, an ELMA user can create a fake company name, then open an ‘interview’ with the system.

Each client using ELMA can select, for example, any of the relevant Business Objectives (Market drivers & priorities, Content strategy, Process, etc.). They can also select any of the questions that are addressed within any of the seven Topics. This means that individualized interview paths can be easily created to respond to a given client’s needs. Similar interview paths can then be collected into localization ‘road maps,’ containing only those questions that are particularly relevant to a specific ‘rank’ or ‘type’ of client.

The system establishes a score on the basis of the answers to the questions selected, and the corresponding ‘localization maturity level’ is displayed graphically. These graphs offer an excellent entry point for the localization practitioner, consultant or vendor to discuss actions that will improve the organization’s localization practices.

Note, however, that ELMA, whether as a model of Best Practice or as a diagnostic tool for maturity assessment, is not designed to supply an automatic ‘method’ that can be applied to improve localization practice or ensure quality of performance. Its role is to provide an environment for understanding localization issues and evaluating an organization’s readiness to deliver appropriate results.

Perhaps the key benefit of the ELMA tool will be to enable the accumulation of comparative maturity assessment data as new clients add their answers to the database. Over time, these data and their associated scores will provide a wealth of further industry-relevant information about real localization practice for the industry as a whole. Over time, the statements and questions can be modified through collective feedback, so that ELMA can further fine-tune its model to address evolving or new practices.

Building Consensus

It will only be possible to build a convincing benchmarking ‘service’ out of the consortium’s model of best practices when all stakeholders buy into its content and implications. To seek feedback, build consensus about these Best Practice statements, and fine-tune the model to real needs, the EEEL consortium is currently running a campaign of dissemination in order to share its proposals with the industry as a whole. Actions include presentations at conferences, Webcasts (which will be archived on the EEEL website), a series of Web teleconferences or online seminars with various European companies, together with a number of feedback sessions with the European Commission’s own e-Content panel.

The consortium also intends to make the ELMA model (with its associated Case Studies) available to management educators. Now that there is evidence that C-level commitment can make all the difference for the success of certain globalization and localization projects, it seems appropriate to start educating managers in general as to the strategic importance of localization by providing an appropriate model.

It is hoped that this dissemination process will enable all interested parties to join the conversation about Best Practice, contribute to the fine-tuning still required, and enable the model to be adopted by multilingual content publishers across all major industries. If you have comments, queries or suggestions about ELMA, the consortium would very much like to hear from you.

For full details about EEEL, the Localization Case Studies and other information, please go to www.eeel-online.com. For more information on the ELMA prototype model, LISA members are encouraged to review the presentation given by EEEL members at the LISA Europe Forum in London in July 2003.