Interview

Globalization Insider: The theme for the LISA Forum USA in San Francisco from April 10-12 was “Managing Content Globally: Erasing the Divide Between Content Creators and Localizers for Good.” Our poll on the LISA site in March (based on 164 responses) shows that 54% agree with the statement, "Is the divide between content creation and localization/globalization disappearing?" Is this what you see happening at HP?

Todd Karnig: Speaking for HP, we’re probably somewhere in the middle. We’ve made progress in narrowing the divide, and we’re moving closer and closer to a unified state over time. However, HP is a very big company with many independent product lines that are very dynamic. This will never change because it has been the basis for the company’s overall success. However, when you’re centralizing and globalizing a function of this scale, your challenge is made all that much harder.

I used to describe this process as “steering the aircraft carrier towards the destination .” However, now I realize that it’s really more like lots of little speedboats! The job is often to scoop them up and put them back on the aircraft carrier heading towards the end point.

It’s important to understand the scale of this challenge for us. Here are just a few numbers to put it in perspective:

80,000 SKUs across 81 product lines in 35 languages for 47 countries and regions that currently require 1.5 million pages!

HP makes and markets approximately 80,000 products. And each of these products has content that changes quickly – usually within a matter of weeks. This means that we needed to understand what it meant to really create content correctly upstream for these 80,000 SKUs, so that downstream it could be used and reused in various ways through various channels. Once the team understood this, we could apply standards to what we were doing to build an infrastructure that made sense for independent product divisions with different needs – both at the product and local customer levels. Put simply, Create once, use many.

Insider: Was there a top-down initiative at HP to rationalize how you manage content globally at the company?

Karnig: Yes, there have been mandates from the top down, but most of the success has come at the grassroots level. Of course, budgets must be in alignment with the business divisions to be successful with something like this. However, the real traction has come with the alignment from the bottom up.

“We love your products, but it’s very difficult to buy from you, and we want to buy more from you.”

What triggered the biggest change was customer feedback that indicated, “We love your products, but it’s difficult to buy from you, and we want to buy more from you.” Based on this feedback, we decided (1) to simplify the entire process of producing the global content for our web sites, (2) to optimize our turnaround times for this content so that it was neither too early or too late, and (3) to centralize and optimize the tools and infrastructure for content generation and translation. It sounded easy, but our team had to convince many people to change their processes so that they would come out winners in the end.

There is a ton of momentum right now in the content space. Our model is truly beginning to give us a competitive advantage. Proof of this is that lots of people now want to join our organization!

Editor’s Note: For insights into the progress that HP has made in managing its content globally, the following presentations are available for download if you are logged into the LISA web site as a LISA Member:

LISA CHINA Focus 2007 in Beijing
Globalization of Product Information

LISA Forum Europe 2006 in Warsaw
Global Product Information Management: Supporting Sales Activities in HP EMEA

Globalization: The Opportunity Case in Poland and the Central European Region and the Role that Localization Plays

LISA CHINA Focus 2006 in Shanghai
Back to Basics: Localizing Websites for Global Coverage

Global Capacity, Project Scope and Productivity With Team Members

Insider: What would you and your team do differently if you were to do this all over again?

Karnig: What would we do differently? Perhaps the most important thing that we learned is that you really need to understand what you want to do from a data model perspective – it either helps you long-term or turns out to be an obstacle long-term. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to invest whatever time is required up-front to do it right – even if it takes a lot of time.

We learned the hard way when it comes to content modeling. We started with a model that was much too granular, and it caused problems for the infrastructure and for the downstream publishers who were just not ready yet. To be pervasively accepted, we had to change. Making our content “publisher ready” became our design principle.

We could have gotten to where we are a lot faster than we did. We allowed too much power in too few hands during the initial design phases. It turned out in retrospect that the people designing the overall architecture had a very strong philosophical orientation towards granularity and hyper-flexibility. What happens is that on paper, granularity makes lots and lots of sense, but in practice – whether in a technical or business sense – it becomes very difficult to execute. Our current content model is less flexible than it could be, but we have struck a balance that is good for us in the present. However, we will have to evolve to meet the needs of the future.

Insider: Can you give us some information about your customer base and the customers your program is trying to serve?

Over 60% of HP’s USD 91 billion in net revenues is now generated outside of the U.S.

Karnig: More than 60% of HP’s USD 91 billion in net revenue is now generated outside of the U.S; we do business in 180 countries. By the end of this year, every major country will be getting their content for their public web pages (hp.com) out of our central repository. Our commerce storefronts are now also fed from this system. All enterprise content is now generated from the central repository in the local language. The content for our small- to medium-sized business (SMB) customers will be generated in the same way by the end of this year. All consumer content, except for that used in the U.S., now comes from the central repository. All of this means a very big win for HP and a huge competitive advantage.

An amazing by-product of all of this work is that there are now 4,000 content subscriptions from outside the firewall to our central repository. This means that we can now feed an organization such as CNET what they need. Just a few years ago, CNET had to find and produce its own content from various sites.

Insider: What do you see in your crystal ball down the road?

Karnig: We’re gearing up for Web 2.0. What will it take to get there? What will it mean for managing our content globally? We are working on the answers to these questions now.

One thing we are sure of, though, is that there will be implications for every stage of the content value chain. During my keynote, I will provide our perspective of how we see technology and social factors converging, and some of the trends that we see emerging from all of this.

I will say that we definitely believe that the future is now in the sense that technology and communication are shifting in a major way. There’s plenty of work left to do. We’re nearer the destination, but not there yet!

Editor’s Note: You can download a copy of Karnig’s presentation ("Global Digital Content Management: Today and the Future") by logging into the LISA web site as a LISA Member.

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Todd Karnig is a Director in the HP.com Customer Experience Organization, leading the Global Content Acquisition (GCA) group. Since joining HP in 2001, Karnig has helped to transform the HP content management initiative into today's integrated, company-wide function that has achieved 30% in year-over-year, cost-to-serve reductions, while supporting a 50% increase in new product introductions. Prior to HP, Karnig was Vice President of eCommerce Business Development at Bank One; he has also held several management positions spanning sales, marketing and operations. Karnig earned his MBA at Arizona State University.