Editorial

One of the key issues that surfaced during the Shanghai Forum was how to support Chinese companies that are now expanding outside of their domestic market. LISA Member Huawei Technologies was one of the first Chinese companies to successfully expand internationally. Research firm Millward Brown recently published its list of the world’s most powerful brands. China Mobile ranked 4th, ahead of Marlboro, Wal-Mart, Google, IBM, Citibank and Toyota. Only Microsoft, GE and Coke were ahead of it.

The competitive environment that these companies will face is described by Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation for IBM his article (premium) entitled, It’s a (Globalized) Jungle Out There. If doing business in a fast-changing, competitive marketplace has always felt like a jungle, things have gotten a few notches more "interesting," in terms of both risks and opportunities, as the jungle has now been globalized. Those companies that do not adapt to the major changes taking place will be left behind, their place taken by new companies born from the new competitive landscape. Check out what Wladawsky-Berger has to say about the commoditization of products and services and reputation capital.

There has been very little data available on global business practices – until now! For real data and insights into current global business practices, order LISA’s newest survey report, Global Business Practices. LISA and the Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS), with input from the World Bank, teamed up to explore how companies run their global operations. Use the survey report to confirm where other companies are placing their global business priorities, and leverage this information as a baseline for comparison. Learn who is paying for what globalization services, and how much they are paying. Find out exactly what types of international business consulting services that companies require and the profiles of their preferred service providers for these services. Click here (public) to read an excerpt from the report.

Click here to order the Global Business Practices Survey Report.

To support your efforts to stay on-track with your global information management initiatives “in the jungle,” LISA is gearing up for its annual Global Strategies Summit, to be held in New York City from June 26-30. The theme this year is Meeting the Challenges of Diverse Markets with Integrated Solutions and Strategies. Ann Rockley, author of Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, and recently named an Honorary Fellow by the Society for Technical Communication, will be the keynote speaker. (Read Managing Global Content: A Unified Content Strategy.)

Click here for special packages for New York.

We have put together special packages (including membership, publications, workshops and free day passes) to entice you to join your global content management colleagues in New York. Just click here.

Normally, I wouldn’t do this, but I want to recognize our two Media Sponsors for the Summit: CMPros and CMS Watch™. This is because both groups offer unbiased and high-quality information to those of you who are working on strategic global information management initiatives. Sooo, here’s my short advertisement for both groups!

CM Pros is a membership organization that fosters the sharing of content management information, practices and strategies. Its goal is to improve content management practices within all organizations by collecting, developing, organizing and delivering peer-vetted knowledge. Its members develop and publish best practices in a wide range of content management areas.

CMS Watch is a trusted, comprehensive source for unbiased, vendor evaluation reports for content management, search, records management, and portal technologies. Thousands of enterprises, government organizations, and consultants worldwide rely on CMS Watch reports to provide the in-depth technical analysis necessary to guide them step-by-step through a vendor selection process. To retain its independence as a vendor-neutral analyst firm, CMS Watch works solely for solutions buyers and never for the vendors it covers.

Terminology, obviously, is one of the key drivers in global information management. For the latest insights, read Terminology as a Key Driver in Business Communications, (public) by Kara Warburton, IBM Terminologist and Chair of the LISA Terminology SIG.

In Shanghai, Warburton’s presentation on terminology (Managing Terminology for Content Management and Localization) was ranked number one by Forum participants, and her terminology workshop was popular as well. She will be giving a 2-day workshop, Developing Products for Multinational Markets: Effective Terminology Management, in New York on June 29-30.

The latest standard from LISA’s OSCAR, Global Information Metrics eXchange – Volume (GMX/V), has been approved and has entered the final public comment phase. This standard solves an issue that has long plagued the translation/localization industry, i.e., the lack of a verifiable industry standard for word and character counts, by mandating XLIFF as the canonical form for word and character counts. Localization tool providers have been consulted and have contributed to this standard. We would appreciate your views/comments as well. Please visit http://www.lisa.org/standards/gmx/GMX-V.html and read Global Information Management Metrics (GMX) – Slaying the Word Count Dragon (public) in this issue, an update from Andrzej Zydroń, CTO of XML-INTL and Member of the LISA OSCAR Steering Committee.

Hanan Lavy, International R&D Manager for Mercury Interactive, is one of those very rare technical people who places the needs of his customers and sales/marketing/support colleagues first. It is an extremely difficult balancing act since he has to generate revenues at the same time. Lavy and his team currently support the company in shipping about 20 releases in 4-5 languages, and approximately half of these are simpshipped! In Considering SimShip? Look Before You Leap!, (premium) Lavy provides a first-person perspective and shares his very practical advice on how to integrate simship as a globalized business process.

In the latest installment of John Freivald’s column, Money Talks, (premium) Rory Cowan explains how the localization industry has become all that we might have hoped: tech-heavy, important and big. He warns us that the challenge that we now face is to understand that globalizing the enterprise is not about the process of task, but rather the process of the process.

You don’t own your brand – it only resides in the minds of others.

My favorite globalization slip-up to for this month is Google’s choice of its name in Mandarin Chinese. Unveiled in April as “Guge” or “Valley Song” (when translated back into English), the online community in China has been very vocal in expressing that the name doesn’t fit (too awkward, weird, unsophisticated, uncool, etc.). In a poll by news portal Sina.com, 85% of respondents were opposed to Guge, and tens of thousands of people have signed a petition calling for Google to rethink its Mandarin identity. As LISA Member Q Malandrino, Executive Director for Interbrand Corporation, reminds us, You don’t own your brand – it only resides in the minds of others. Words to live by! (Read Branding Is a Lot Like … Translation.)

That’s all for this month. See you in New York in June!