Human factors and resistance to change often present the greatest hurdles.

The integration of domestic and global business requires the implementation of processes and technologies to support global markets and deliver benefits to end users, regardless of language or location. While we are now capable of fully implementing the technical support for such large-scale business, human factors and resistance to change often present the greatest hurdles. Only an understanding of the requirements of global business, and experience with how to meet these demands, can help companies make appropriate decisions and fully embrace the processes and technologies to ensure success.

Attendees at the LISA Global Strategies Summit 2005 in Boston (USA) in May focused on how to automate global business processes, both at the high level needed for management, and at the practical level needed to make company mandates happen. They also had the opportunity to participate in several new and on-going initiatives being launched through LISA:

1. The LISA Global Content Management Initiative (see below).

2. The Corporate Accreditation Initiative (take our Reader’s Poll at www.lisa.org and review the presentation, From Professional Certification to Corporate Accreditation). Editor's Note: This opens a PDF file that is only available to LISA Members.

3. The first annual Ten Best International Web Support Sites Awards Program (in collaboration with the Association of Support Professionals’ prestigious Ten Best Web Support Sites competition).

In addition, attendees were updated on the huge strides that OSCAR has made recently under the new leadership of Andrzej Zydroń, CTO at xml-intl. Two standards (TBX-Link and GMX) are now available for public comment. And OSCAR recently adopted xml:tm as a work item.

It is now clear that globalization is not a passing fad when viewed from an economic perspective. The world will never, ever be the same again. The internet means that globalization is now a strategic initiative within companies, instead of requiring a separate business case. When analyzing business processes, it’s all about time-to-profit, time-to-value and time-to-market. The question now is not, “How much more revenue will I drive if I globalize?” Rather, it’s “If I miss a month, how much will I lose? Millions or billions?”

Senior executives need to learn how to connect the dots.

The key is to tie these concepts to ROI so that senior executives can easily connect the dots between increasing their international revenues and controlling their brand, and leveraging the localization process and its related technologies to integrate the two.

Globalization is “just another business process.”

In her keynote, The Globalization Landscape (Editor’s Note: This opens a PDF file that is only available to LISA Members), Susan Mills (Globalization Executive and Director, User Technologies at IBM) described how it is time to view globalization as “just another business process” to be integrated into the larger enterprise business transformation effort. What is required is a holistic view of all of our customers’ business processes, end-to-end.

SMEs recognize that the future is here now.

This will enable us to ask the right questions to understand what’s happening in a company that wants, for example, to move into China. And there are many opportunities. They include “reverse” localization for emerging markets such as China and India, along with supporting the globalization efforts of SMEs that recognize that the future is here now. (Read The Winds Are in Our Favor This Time: The World Really Is Flat.)

The Aberdeen Group predicts that the highest rate of growth in terms of globalization will occur in the SME sector over the next three to five years. A very important trend noted by many Summit attendees is that the investment to manage globalization is going down very fast, which means that SMEs worldwide will soon have a clear opportunity to take on and manage this process themselves. We need to be there to guide them and prevent them from reinventing the wheel.

In the content management sector, the technologies and business processes are now available to make this a reality for SMEs. ASP models for CMS are appearing that provide the benefits of XML for SMEs and free them from carrying the burden of implementation (review the presentation, Success With XML and Content Management. Editor’s Note: This opens a PDF file that is only available to LISA Members.)

LISA announces its Global Content Management Initiative.

As the result of their very successful workshop preceding the Summit (Understanding Content Management and Global Translation Management Systems), Alison Toon (HP) and Andrew Draheim (Consultant to the World Bank) will be leading the LISA Global Content Management Initiative. Its purpose is to keep the energy and spirit of the first workshop alive by sharing common challenges, and developing solutions, standards and best practices in this area. It will enable the first generation of global content management (GCM) implementers to share their expertise with the next generation. And, by the way, the first generation of GCM implementers hasn’t done badly at all … average translation reuse now stands at 63% for HP across ALL types of content! Feel free to contact either Alison.toon@hp.com or Andrew.Draheim@comcast.net with your ideas and/or materials.

Global content management systems are implemented on the vendor side now, not the client’s. During one of the most popular presentations during the Summit, a panel led by Greg Rosner (thebigword) showcased real people, working for real companies, solving real challenges. During GCM: Real-World Models for Success, participants from BMC Software, British Airways, GE Advanced Materials/Kinetic, HP and Novell described the human resources, the processes, and the technology that they bring to bear on localizing and distributing content. They also described where they draw the line in terms of the functions done in-house vs. outsourced, and the impact on ROI.

Web sites are “born global.”

In two separate sessions that had people seriously reassessing their strategic business plans in the hallways, Curt Porritt (10X Marketing) and Professor Nitish Singh (California State University, Chico) reminded attendees that web sites are “born global,” and that ”If you localize it, they will come” just isn’t good enough anymore.

The opportunity is huge, with internet usage continuing to soar. According to glreach.com, as of September 2004, there were more than 800 million users worldwide, representing an increase of 121 million people over the previous year (roughly the population of Japan!). English stood at 35.2%, Chinese at 13.7% and Spanish at 9%. Non-English markets are growing even faster than English-speaking ones (but not in terms of e-commerce). Expect this to continue.

Why bother to localize unless you are localizing for search engines?

Search engines generate much more revenue than any other method on the internet – the race isn’t even close – with nearly 50% being generated by search engines. Most other methods, except for rich media, are actually decreasing, with search engines expected to grow.

With 85% of all internet traffic being directed by search engines, Porritt questions why you are bothering to localize unless you are localizing for search engines, especially with the number of non-English speakers on the internet continuing to grow at such a fast pace. It is extremely important how a site is built with certain keywords, and therefore, how it is localized. Obviously, this will eventually have a dramatic effect on terminology. Check out Web Site Google-ization – Localizing for Search Engines (this opens a PDF file that is only available to LISA Members) for more information on how 10X Marketing’s tools support companies to leverage their keywords to (truly) generate increased international revenues.

But once you drive people to your site, what then? You must hit the sweet spot by designing and implementing your site for other cultures. According to Singh, cultural customization begins where basic localization ends. It means moving beyond simple translation, cosmetic adaptation, basic conversions and use of global templates. It is a complete “immersion” in the culture of the target market. A comprehensive cultural customization will reflect three levels of cultural adaptation: perception, symbolism and behavior. You can tell when it’s an American site for China. The goal is to get beyond this.

Based on research (including literature review, web site content analysis, intercoder ratings, experiments and validation), Singh and his team have developed a cultural customization tool to aid companies in creating more appropriate web sites. It is based on the work of Dr. Geert Hofstede that describes the cultural characteristics to emphasize on web sites: individualism-collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, power distance, masculinity-femininity and high and low context. Check out Designing Culturally Customized Web Sites: The Next Localization Frontier (this opens a PDF file that is only available to LISA Members) and read Applying Cultural Theories to Website Localization, by Dr. Andy Smith.

Once customers can find you and are surfing your site, what next? Jeffrey Tarter, Executive Director of the Association of Support Professionals, led a panel consisting of BMC, Canon/TechTeam Global and Rockwell Automation to discuss the current state of customer support on the web.

The current state of maintaining localized support sites on the web? “Living hell!”

As technology companies have moved toward a self-service model, they have developed some of the most content-rich and complex sites to be found anywhere on the web. Moreover, these sites need constant updating, often on very tight schedules. Managing support in one language is difficult—trying to satisfy the needs of customers in global markets takes extraordinary efforts. (According to Tarter, “living hell” is often the term used to describe the work in maintaining localized content for support web sites.) E-Commerce sites only promote the products that a company is currently selling. Customer support sites often store information going back five to ten years. Half the web traffic on a site belonging to a technology company will be generated by support. According to Cisco, 80% of their web site traffic is support-related.

NOTE: LISA and The Association of Support Professionals (ASP) are collaborating to produce the first annual Year’s Ten Best International Web Support Sites Awards Program to honor language implementation on the internet. In conjunction with ASP’s prestigious Ten Best Web Support Sites competition, the winners will be recognized as leaders in innovation and implementation for international online customer service and support. The awards program is open to any organization that provides support sites in three or more languages (including the language of their “home” market). Independent judges will evaluate the sites in five broad categories, based on 25 criteria derived from ASP’s evaluation metrics for its Ten Best Web Support Sites competition. Entries will be accepted through September 5, 2005 at http://www.lisa.org/awards/index.html.

Order “Taking Software to the World” today!

We see clear indications of these same trends in the results of the LISA 2005 Global Software Survey that were just released this week in the form of Taking Software to the World. The survey is the first large-scale examination of the business impact of localized software. The results present a very clear roadmap for end users who purchase localized software and for software developers who want to know exactly where to spend their localization development budgets to sell more products.

There are some truly surprising and very important results. First, translation problems have an impact on customer willingness to upgrade software and to purchase new licenses – totally out of proportion to their actual business impact. In fact, they have almost as much impact as functional problems of greater severity. Second, applications such as anti-virus software showed great sensitivity to localization. Click here for more information.

DITA … the “holy grail” of content reuse

On the technology side during the Summit, DITA, SOAP and xml:tm shared the limelight. DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture), recently donated to the Open Source Community by IBM, was a hot topic with several sessions devoted to what some are calling the “holy grail” of content reuse. According to Dave Schell, Program Director and DITA Evangelist at IBM, the key is to find a way for customers and tech support to be able to answer the very first question on the very first day that a problem is discovered, AND to be able to update the information immediately. Perhaps the first ten people will experience the same problem, but the next 10,000 will not. The savings in cost for warranties, customer service and support, etc. are obvious. DITA provides this capability. (Check out the IBM DITA information page and DITA – An Introduction [this link opens a PDF file that is only available to LISA Members]).

Imagine how a python eats ...

In describing how DITA supports the translation process, Schell told the audience to imagine how a python eats. It wraps itself around its prey and then swallows it whole. It then takes about three days to consume its meal. That’s the old way of translating a software manual – days spent consuming and then spitting it back out. Using DITA enables you to send out that same software manual for translation as soon as it has been reviewed and approved. In other words, smaller meals for the “python” throughout the entire development cycle.

It was clear from several case studies during the Summit, that SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) has definitely come into its own for those of us involved in getting products to market faster. As more and more content is chunked, allowing a greater and greater degree of granularity and reuse of content, customers and service providers now face the challenge of how to manipulate hundreds and thousands of files between themselves. SOAP enables a smooth interchange. (Check out Increasing Automotive Content Translation Productivity.)

Standards are like LEGO building blocks.

xml:tm, the “new kid on the block,” was recently donated as an open source project by xml-Intl and adopted by OSCAR as a work item. xml:tm remembers sentence level information (both in author memory and translation memory), thus allowing reuse of previously authored sentences. The TM component is based on the author memory component and allows creation of XLIFF documents and their reuse. xml:tm can totally automate project management, and allows translation to be done on the web with a simplified workflow in which files can’t get lost or corrupted. It also moves the concept of matching to a standard and can integrate with DITA and other tools, in the same way that Lego blocks snap together. (For more background information, read xml:tm.)

Globalization is a journey.

In summary, Dan Kuperstein (EMC Corporation) reminded attendees that globalization is a journey. He returned for an encore presentation in Boston to update everyone on the tremendous strides made at EMC since he first shared the company’s globalization initiative during the LISA Forum Europe 2003 (this link opens a PDF file that is only available to LISA Members).

EMC Corporation is rather unusual in that it is one of just a few U.S. companies to have a Globalization Program Office (GPO) that truly services the entire enterprise. If you want to emulate EMC in setting up a GPO, here’s what you need to do. Lead with a strong business case (include lots of math – the original EMC plan was 90 pages) and maintain it. Know your budget and follow the money at every opportunity. Be creative in unleashing the budgets. Remain focused at all times on your core competencies. This means knowing (at all times) what you are good at (and not) and what you want to be. Stay flexible and concentrate on enabling the enterprise. Stay out when it makes sense, get in when it does. Above all, don’t try to own everything. And last, but not least, globalization is a journey, so ensure that you work with great people so that it’s an enjoyable one.

“We should inspire one another to make changes. That’s what LISA is all about.”

In conclusion, LISA continues to fulfill its role as the nexus for the global information management industry by serving as the forum in which to discuss the business needs and to work together to create the products and processes to meet these needs. As Philippe De Sainte Maresville (HP), expressed it, “We should inspire one another to make changes. That’s what LISA is all about.”

As always, there were many other excellent presentations, case studies and workshops on topics such as adapting the LISA QA Model to serve as the quality model for voice, defining global requirements, validating international readiness and globalization career planning. Please refer to the LISA Members Domain for the 76-page Summary Document, which contains detailed writeups for all sessions. You may contact lisa@lisa.org to find out how to access the presentation slides if you are not a LISA member. And remember . . . globalization is just another business process.

And many thanks to our Program Committee for contributing their personal time and energy to make the program possible: Allan Adams (Adams Globalization), Andrew Draheim (Consultant to the World Bank), Claes Holm (Merrill Brink International), Dan Kuperstein (EMC Corporation) and Alison Toon (HP).

Editor’s Note: A special meeting of the LISA General Assembly (GA) was held during the Summit. If you are a GA Member, you may read the minutes and provide input through the LISA Member’s Domain.