Editorial

As I edited the interview this week with Rory Cowan of Lionbridge and Mark Lancaster of SDL, I kept running across phrases like “enabling customers to get their products/services to market faster and at less cost.” The premise of both Localization 2.0 from Lionbridge and Global Information Management is to do precisely that – and to do it as seamlessly and painlessly as possible for customers. Which is, of course, crucial to every company’s bottom line, and exactly what customers have been insisting that they need.

However, there is perhaps another – more urgent – need that many customers haven’t yet recognized. The need for us to provide them with insightful and valuable advice on how to design and produce the right products/services for their targeted markets – or to go even further back up the food chain – to help them target the “right” markets before they even start their (re)design process.

Don’t get me wrong – I am not casting aspersions on any of the very real accomplishments made by the very talented and dedicated teams that Cowan and Lancaster have built at their respective companies. These leaders and visionaries, along with their employees, have done much of the heavy lifting to create this industry, to build value and to integrate what we do with product designers, engineers, marketers and sales people, etc. They have delivered good value to their shareholders, and they have been tireless evangelists. (Disclosure: Mark Lancaster made my job possible at Ashton-Tate back in the early ‘90’s when his International Development Group delivered localized products to our customers – and simshipped them no less, before the term was invented.)

So what am I driving at here? Maintaining competitiveness and how to help our “Old World Customers” take on our “New World Customers,” if we choose to do so. As I watch my neighbors and extended family members here in Turkey buy Chinese motorcycles that page the drivers when their cell phones ring … and cross-country buses that far outdo their competitors in terms of features that their targeted customers find extremely valuable – when they didn’t even realize that they had these needs … and flashlights that will never, ever let you down, I ponder what responsibility our industry has to provide guidance to the “old players” to help them remain competitive.

Maybe the answer is none – perhaps this is simply how the capitalist game always plays out. Perhaps our responsibility lies more on the side of passing on our expertise to the “new players,” so that they don’t have to repeat the mistakes and dead-ends that all of “us old-timers” had to make as we groped our way forward. More likely, it’s both.

Whichever it is, there is much opportunity for our industry on both sides of the fence. Let us here at LISA know what you think about this issue by dropping me an email at editor@lisa.org

It isn’t easy to play on both sides of this multicultural and geographically dispersed fence, especially when doing it as a member of a global virtual team. In Tips for Managing Multi-cultural, Multi-site Teams (premium), Kit Brown (Principal at Comgenesis, LLC and an STC Associate Fellow) discusses the challenges of being a member of a virtual global team, along with tips for team building and web tools that you can use. The bottom line? Communicate, collaborate, coordinate and communicate – and then do it all over again every single day!!

Editor’s Note: You can meet Brown personally when she presents Creating a More Global Company by Internationalizing Your Organization on November 15 at the LISA Forum Europe.

Luckily, LISA has several new publications and upcoming events to help you meet the unique challenges presented by playing on both sides of the fence. Whether you’re a “new player” or an “old player” – or supporting them! – you have a very unique and unusual opportunity to promote what you’re doing in China. LISA has been invited by the China Association for Standardization (CAS) and the Chinese National Institute of Standards (CNIS) to provide content for a forthcoming issue of the China Standardization Journal, which goes out to 25,000 upper-level managers in both the private and public sectors in China. If you are interested in submitting content or an ad, here’s more information on the offer. The deadline is October 13 – only 11 business days away, so don’t procrastinate!

Following the very successful LISA Asia Forum in Shanghai in April, Michael Anobile (LISA Managing Director) and Kara Warburton (IBM Terminologist and Chairperson of the LISA Terminology Special Interest Group) led a delegation of several Members to promote terminology management for the localization industry during the 3rd International Terminology, Standardization and Technology Transfer (TSTT) Conference in Beijing in August. For a short synopsis of the conference, read Focus on Standards: LISA Promotes Terminology Standards in Beijing (public) by Warburton.

Back in the “Old World” (at least from the perspective of the Americas!), we are gearing up for the annual LISA Forum Europe in Warsaw, Poland from November 13-17. Join us for a LISA-exclusive presentation from Rory Cowan (Chairman, President and CEO of Lionbridge) when he delivers the keynote – whether you are a client, a partner or a competitor of his, you will want to hear what this man has to say.

When the Globalization Insider last interviewed Cowan and Mark Lancaster (Chairman and CEO of SDL) in 2003, I worked with three executives to create The Big 3 Speak Out. Obviously, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then, with Lionbridge acquiring Bowne Global Solutions and SDL acquiring TRADOS (among others) along the way. According to Cowan, “Our industry is entering its most exciting phase in a decade.” According to Lancaster, “The challenge is still very simple – how to ensure that customers deliver their products to market faster and at lower cost.” Read the in-depth interview (premium) in our Visionaries Series to find out what these two leaders think about the current trends in China vis-à-vis managing content globally, IBM’s entry into globalization services consulting and the effect that accreditation of localization service providers will have on the industry.

Cowan’s keynote in Warsaw will set the stage for a great lineup of presenters, our always popular LISA Skills Workshops and two exceptional sessions. The first is a LISA Executive Roundtable for SimShip Professionals that will include presenters from Adobe, Cisco, HP, Logitech, SAS and Symantec. If you are challenged by your current simship production model or would like to benchmark your localized simship operation, then sign up today.

The second opportunity in Warsaw will be a special workgroup session on global QA issues, facilitated by Tommy McShane and Ken O’Brien of Symantec (Ireland). Symantec has worked very hard to outsource much of its QA for localized products over the last two years, while maintaining good, long-term relationships with their service providers. McShane and O’Brien will share best practice about outsourcing in this area, along with other participants. Please click here to send in the topics that you would like to see covered during the session. To learn how McShane and O’Brien reinvented their team, read Symantec Discusses Outsourcing QA for Localized Products: Trials and Tribulations (premium).

If you are conducting business in Central or Eastern Europe, you can join LISA today and qualify for some very special deals on Forum attendance, LISA Skills Workshops and LISA Publications.

How many times have you wished that you could access live salary data for Localization Project Managers and Software QA Engineers? Well, now you can. Take part in the LISA Globalization Professionals Salary Survey. Filling out the survey with information about what your organization pays its employees will take only a few minutes of your time, but you will then have on-line access to the latest data from the survey* at no cost. You will also receive a complimentary copy of the 2003 LISA Salary Survey results, a detailed 27-page report on globalization industry salaries worldwide. Click here to fill out the survey today.

NOTE: Unlike “one-shot” surveys, the LISA Salary Survey is designed as an ongoing survey. The localization industry is changing so rapidly that LISA doesn't want to run a survey where the results will be out of date in six months. By allowing individuals to update their data at any time, we can ensure that users always have access to the latest real-time information on salaries worldwide.

In this month’s installment of Money Talks: From Colgate to Chuppies (premium), John Freivalds covers China and how to hire a gruff, retired U.S. Army General to improve your bottom line.

LISA Partners are busy this fall as well. If you need to implement Unicode or manage an internationalization project, then The Thirtieth Internationalization & Unicode Conference (IUC) in Washington, D.C. (USA) on November 15-17 is a “must attend” event. Read the advertorial (public) in this issue for more details on all of the new sessions and updated tutorials for newcomers and experts alike.

Content Management Professionals (CM Pros) will host Content Management and the World Enterprise on November 27 (co-located with the Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies) in Boston (USA). Register by September 30, 2006 and receive a free one-year membership to CM pros.

CMS Watch has just released the 10th edition of The CMS Report, and they will announce the 2nd edition of their Enterprise Portals Report next week. Visit http://www.cmswatch.com/Reports/About/ for more information.

Gotta run. My motorcycle is paging me – it’s almost time to sit down with the family to break the fast for Ramadan.