Editorial

As the opportunities increase to solve the strategic issues related to globalization, the need to waste our energy on evangelizing why this makes sense lessens (finally!). For those of you who know me personally, you know how passionate I am about passing on our globalization knowledge and expertise to the “next generation” and finding innovative ways to ensure that people do not keep reinventing the wheel as they expand into new markets. Arriving on the other side of the chasm means that we can focus – finally – on doing just that.

Three consistent themes ran throughout the presentations, hallway discussions and evening get-togethers during the New York Summit that highlight this new shift:

• How do we develop and implement the right globalization strategy to enable us to get to the next phase within our organization, whether that be an enterprise-wide localization approach, web customer support that serves all of our customers worldwide or an integrated globalization strategy that meets regulatory requirements on a global scale?
• What model should we adopt for our global information management strategy?
• Whatever model or strategy we do adopt, how do we leverage the expertise that exists to avoid making the common mistakes? How do we apply open standards and accreditation to ensure that we reach our goals?

For more details on how many of your colleagues have arrived on the other side of the chasm, read Meeting the Challenges of Diverse Markets With Integrated Solution and Strategies (public).

One LISA Member who is crossing the chasm in real-time this year is the Life and Analytical Sciences Division of PerkinElmer. Operating in a regulatory environment adds another level of complexity to globalization and how to implement it enterprise-wide. PerkinElmer's expanding global presence, combined with its objectives of customer excellence and full regulatory compliance, is driving the need for greater globalization and localization of its customer content. In The Globalization Initiative at PerkinElmer, Inc.: Leveraging the Move to a Customer-centric Focus (premium), Kevin Lorenc, Vice President for Corporate Communications at PerkinElmer, Inc., shares how his organization is moving forward to integrate globalization as “just another business process.”

For more details, download Globalization Assessment of Business Processes in a Regulated Environment, the presentation that Claude Lamoureux (Manager of Multilingual Information Services for PerkinElmer) gave last week at the Summit in New York. He revealed the details of exactly what is going on behind-the-scenes with the company’s Globalization Assessment and described the company’s application of LISA's globalization assessment method in a Six Sigma environment for making the shift to business-optimized compliance in his presentation.

In order to cross the chasm, you need data about how your competitors and partners actually move from international strategy to business plans and local endeavors. This data is in short supply. In an effort to better understand the issues that affect today’s global businesses, and what will affect them tomorrow, 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. The result is LISA’s newest survey report, Global Business Practices.

In Global Business Best Practice: Who Can You Really Trust? (public), Dean Ernest Scalberg of the Fisher Graduate School of International Business at the MIIS and head of the new Center for the Globalization and Localization of Business Exports (GLOBE), discusses some of the significant findings of the survey. He also explores the most critical issues that companies face today as they conduct their international business and provides advice for small- to medium-sized enterprises that are developing their global expansion strategies.

Cost-efficient global information management is key to building the global enterprise. Ann Rockley (President of The Rockley Group) provided a roadmap for developing a successful global information management strategy in her keynote presentation last week in New York, Optimization Begins at the Source: Developing a Unified Content Strategy. In her best-selling book, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, she provides the concepts, strategies, guidelines, processes and technological options that will prepare enterprise content managers and authors to meet the increasing demands of creating, managing and distributing content. Based on the successful methodology developed by The Rockley Group, the book is designed to help organizations to reduce the cost and effort of complex information creation and management ranging from marketing materials, through customer support materials, and regulatory documents. Click here to read an excerpt (premium).

The internet is like the universe – constantly expanding. Every day, millions of web pages are added in hundreds, if not thousands, of languages. Google now offers more than 115 different language interfaces. Deloitte offers more than 100 country web sites. However, as this universe expands, the odds of web visitors getting lost increase. And because you cannot control how people arrive at your web site, you need to do all you can to ensure that, once they’ve arrived, they find where they need to go. John Yunker’s new book, The Art of the Global Gateway, will help. It provides techniques and recommendations that have helped companies increase traffic to their local web sites from 10% to more than 25%. Click here to read an excerpt (premium).

If you haven’t done so already, check out LISA’s newest book, 2006 Ten Best International Web Sites to find out how you can adapt some of the same strategies to better support your global customers.

For the latest news on what’s happening with the TBX standard, read TBX Lite News (public), by Kara Warburton, IBM Terminologist.

For the latest update of the W3C document, Best Practices for XML Localization, click here.

That’s all for this month. Looking forward to seeing some of you in person as I travel through the U.S. over the next six weeks.