Revenue growth and being responsive to customers are not just for the “Big Guys.” These are critical issues, as well, for the 80% of all U.S. companies considered to be SMEs (small- to medium-sized enterprises) and the 20 million SMEs providing two-thirds of Europe’s private employment. However, smaller enterprises cannot afford to go through the learning curve of the Big Guys. They must get it right and do so the first time, perhaps even within their first year of business, as the world increasingly faces off between three huge trading blocks: China and the rest of Asia, the EU and the Americas.

The number one challenge is when to go global, when to go regional and when to remain local.

Perhaps the key concepts to getting this global thing right are regional and local, especially when targeting the European Union (EU). The number one challenge for any manager within a global organization today is when to go global, when to go regional and when to remain local. It is a very tough balancing act due to the conflicting desires for cross-border centralization (in the form of single-market concentration) and local control (in the form of fragmented markets) that are meeting head-on.

The secret is not to apply the same strategy to every function or business process. For example, it still makes sense in most cases to centralize functions such as accounting, legal, etc. at an organization’s global headquarters, while processes such as sales, marketing, human resources management, etc. are often best executed at either the regional and/or local levels. Successful Global Managers must rise above their own nationalities, and the cultures in which they are working, to apply their creativity to figuring out how their products and services must be adapted (or not) to succeed in a variety of markets, no matter how local they may be.

The EU is not all that different from most of the rest of the world.

With all due respect, the EU is not all that different from most of the rest of the world. Perhaps its customers are a bit more vocal for reasons due to history and political process, but if it has a lesson to teach, as Andrew Joscelyne explains in his article, Europe as the Model for Globalization, it is that markets are fractals. The global pattern of market differentiation is re-enacted at each level the deeper one digs. Region, country, locale, language - the customer may be a far more literal and singular entity than we first thought. Europe is best seen as a marketplace of markets, a test case for constantly localizable niche content. Divided we stand.

The Turks’ longstanding custom of assimilation makes doing business with them a refreshing challenge.

And for those on the outside waiting to get into the EU (including the rest of the former Eastern Europe and Turkey), they wish it luck and hope to join sooner rather than later. In his article, Localization Takes Hold in Turkey (premium), Vedat Oygur, General Manager of LISA Member LOCASIS Ltd., describes the current state of the localization market in Turkey, how EU membership will impact the industry and the importance of standards. In a sidebar, I take the liberty of explaining how the Turks’ longstanding custom of linguistic and cultural assimilation makes doing business in the country a refreshing and enjoyable challenge for global business people.

The EU is the world's largest trader of goods and services.

Compliance remains a critical issue for any company targeting its products within the EU. There are now 455 million consumers in the European Union's 25 Member States, far out-distancing the number of U.S. consumers at 293 million. The EU is the world's largest trader of goods and services. In 2003, its $10.5 trillion Gross Domestic Product (GDP) edged ahead of the $10.4 trillion GDP of the U.S. and was nearly 6.5 times larger than China’s. [Source: The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, Jeremy Rifkin].

If you need help expanding anywhere within the EU (even if you’re not a U.S.-based organization), check out The U.S. Mission to the European Union – Seize the Opportunity! (premium), an inside look by Rosemary Gallant, Commercial Attaché from the U.S. Mission to the EU. Then re-read LISA’s brief illustrated guide, EC Rider – How European Funding Can Help SMEs and An Update on the EU’s In-Vitro Diagnostic (IVD) Directive.

Who’s playing the China Card?

And from whom is China taking the lead in terms of technological alliances? If you guessed the EU, then you may be right. Hu Jintao, the President of the People’s Republic of China, is leading his country’s high-tech charge via alliances with the EU rather than with the U.S. If you’re interested in why Jacques Chirac returned from China last month with more than US$ 4 billion in orders, check out Leaders of the (Free) Market World. If trade between the EU and China in the second half of this year expands as fast as it did during the first six months, the two will be each others' largest trading partners by December (see French Go For the Big Stakes in China Talks).

Leverage LISA as the nexus – don’t waste time reinventing the wheel.

So the challenge for today’s Global Manager has become one of staying up-to-the-minute with the latest global business trends, while at the same time, not reinventing the wheel each time a possible “alligator” rears its head. LISA can help the Global Manager by doing what it does best: serving as the nexus to provide language technology standards and best practice guidelines for enterprise globalization, along with the appropriate networking opportunities to support these. These decrease the number of unknown factors over time, which thus reduces risk. Music to any manager’s ears.

One of the most enduring features of the language technology industry has been the inconsistency of word counts, not only between rival products, but also even between different versions of the same product. Trying to establish a measure for the size of a given GILT task is not unlike trying to fight a many-headed dragon. Andrzej Zydron, CTO at xml-Intl Ltd. and Member of the OASIS Technical Committees for Translation Web Services (TransWS), XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) and XLIFF Segmentation, explains the issues surrounding word count and presents a proposal to solve the problem in his article, GILT Metrics – Slaying the Word Count Dragon (Updated) (public).

Editor’s Note: For the very latest news on OSCAR initiatives, check out the presentation, LISA’s Open Standards OSCAR Initiatives (available to LISA members), recently given during the LISA Forum Europe by LISA Members Andrzej Zydron, David Pooley (SDL International) and Daniel Benito (ATRIL Software). For more information on why OSCAR is so re-energized, read OSCAR: Visioning the Future of Standards.

F-Secure was an early supporter of the TMX (Translation Memory eXchange) standard and continues to be an extremely strong advocate on the customer side for encouraging language tools vendors to play to their individual strengths, rather than to invest in proprietary tools and processes. The company depends on an open environment to meet its critical time-to-market goals in the extremely competitive security market. Mika Pehkonen, in Time-to-Market: It’s Standards or Die! (public), describes how the Localization and Development Teams are integrated at F-Secure to produce a security service that ideally responds to threats even before they materialize.

Editor’s Note: For more details, see Pehkonen’s presentation at the recent LISA Forum Europe, Expanding TM Usage Across the Enterprise.

And in case you were not aware, LISA Member GlobalSight has just certified Ambassador, its flagship Globalization management System (GMS) as compliant with the Level 2 TMX standard.

As Pehkonen points out, any manager who is in the process of going global will profit by implementing whatever best practices apply to his/her current organization. Lost time and increased costs can be avoided since no wheels have to be reinvented, and the organization can be up and running in new markets much sooner. LISA is now publishing an on-going series of Best Practice Guides that are available as free downloads from the LISA web site. Current titles include Quality Assurance – The Client Perspective and Implementing Machine Translation. Check out the excerpt from the Quality Assurance Best Practice Guide (public) in this issue.

Take advantage of the workshops being offered by LISA Members.

LISA Member TermNet will be running its TAMA 2004 Cologne Workshops, emphasizing multilingual content management, at the end of November. For more information, just click here.

Standards and policies are also needed at the global level in terms of language. As the abovementioned IBM Survey documents, any organization maturing into a global enterprise today must do it within a pre-existing global ecosystem, with multiple points of intersection among business, government and academia. During the first Executive Language Summit held recently in Paris, the European Commission, the Canadian Government, the African Development Bank, the International Accounting Standards Board, IBM, Hewlett Packard, CLS Communication AG, SDL International, AILIA, LISA and BrandLink International launched a global initiative mandated to position language and related technologies and standards at the forefront of global communication as the basis for worldwide economic growth.

Help implement multilingual communication as worldwide policy.

As Karl-Johan Lönnroth, Director General of the European Commission’s Directorate General for Translation, pointed out, “Without focus and funding, we face a critical decline in our ability to develop countries, markets and economies.” The Executive Language Summit confirmed that the world is now a collection of global villages, each entitled to market access and information in its own language and adapted to its own cultural preferences. Multilingual communication is the business imperative in the 21st century and will serve as the basis for increased world trade, the free flow of labor and open markets.

I invite you to join LISA and the participants in the Executive Language Summit in taking this message forward to include more governments, global institutions and businesses in our drive to increase language education and to implement multilingual communication as worldwide policy.

The industry is experiencing an upturn.

Against this global backdrop, we can now safely say that the industry is experiencing an upturn. Check out the current installment of John Freivalds’ popular column, Money Talks for confirmation by the numbers. The presentations and the buzz in the hallways and in the hotel bar among the large number of attendees at the LISA Forum Europe 2004 in Marne-la-Vallée, France in October also confirmed this. There was also clear evidence that the industry continues to mature as the underlying theme to the Forum was branding and the value that it will bring to all players in the language industry, in both the public and private sectors. Read the Forum Overview (public) in this issue for more details.

Editor’s Note: LISA’s Annual General Assembly (GA) Meeting also took place during the Forum. There are big changes on the horizon for LISA. If you are a GA Member, you may read about them and provide input through the Member’s Domain.

A successful public-private partnership in Barcelona.

And in our on-going campaign to highlight industry players who are running successful businesses, while at the same time, are giving back to their communities and the world-at-large, we highlight a public-private partnership in Barcelona, Spain. In his article, How to Localize Into a Minority Language Without Dying in the Process (premium), Michael Scholand, CEO of STAR Servicios Lingüísticos, shares how his team joined with the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona to localize Transit XV into Catalan. This has allowed the STAR team in Catalonia to continue fulfilling what it regards as an important aspect of its social responsibility: the on-going education of language professionals.

And some advice for this week… remember that the euro is accepted even where they don’t take American Express… and there are still refreshing and enjoyable markets that are as yet untapped.