Editorial

Developing the perfect profile for your M&A candidates depends on your knowing your own organization – intimately understanding its strengths and weaknesses – and having a clear vision of how your M&A strategy meshes with your overall corporate strategy.

1. Why engage in M&A at this point in time? Pluses? Negatives?

2. How should an M&A candidate leverage one or more of your organization’s strengths, or cancel out one or more of its weaknesses?

Have You Downloaded Free Business Data from LISA? If you’re a LISA Member, the following business data is free. If you’re not, then consider joining (click here for more information), or click on the links below to purchase. LISA’s 2007 Best International Web Support Sites Awards Report. Find out how Cathay Pacific Airlines, Cisco Systems, CX Agents, Dell, HP, McAfee and Sony rise above their competitors through excelling in web support for their international customers. The report includes opinions from independent judges, as well as essays by the companies themselves. Click here to download or to order your copy today. Taking Software to the World: China Edition. An update to LISA’s large-scale examination of the factors that influence business users’ purchase and use of localized software. This updated research for China confirms that the quality of multilingual content is one area where companies entering the Chinese market can differentiate themselves. Click here to download or to order your copy today. LISA Best Practice Guide: Managing Global Content. The new 3rd edition includes updated benchmarking data and case studies for decision makers, and specific do's and don'ts for all aspects of implementing GCMS. Learn how to develop your own International Content Model and how to prepare your Request for Proposal (RFP) from the experts. Click here to download or to order your copy today. Creating Global Content: Results of the 2007 LISA Survey. Compare and benchmark your company’s content and terminology management processes to strike the right balance between providing a satisfying customer experience in local languages/cultures vs. maintaining and enhancing your brand. Click here to download or to order your copy today. Current Topics in Globalization: Outsourcing Best Practices for the QA of Localized Software. Compare and benchmark your company’s QA processes against the best practices currently in use by some of the world’s most respected software developers. Click here to download or to order your copy today.

Here are some questions, along with a sample weighted chart, to get you started:

3. What type of customer should your ideal candidate bring to the table? How much in incremental revenues over the next 12-24 months?

4. Does your ideal candidate need to have any special technical, linguistic or domain expertise? What about R&D, operations, sales, marketing or support expertise?

5. What characteristics in an ideal candidate would enhance the integration of your workflows, processes and tools?

6. What are the top three strengths of your own corporate culture? Is there anything that you have discovered about a particular candidate that would prevent you from transferring/enhancing these strengths?

7. What are three weaknesses that would keep you from merging/acquiring a particular candidate?

8. Can your team work together with a candidate’s team on a difficult project as part of the qualification process? (You should rate the candidate on specified criteria during the project.)

9. What are the cultural differences, if any, that could derail the merger/acquisition?

10. Does your candidate have a profile for its ideal partner in a merger/acquisition? If so, how do you measure up to it?

Expanding on the issue in number ten above, the development of a perfect profile applies as well to the party looking to merge or to be acquired. The more focused they are on the type of partner they prefer, the higher the chances for the merger/acquisition to be successful for both parties.

The next step in creating your perfect profile is to develop a weighted chart that will enable you to evaluate your candidates as objectively as possible. Documenting your preferred criteria and assigning a specific weight to each one also provides two other benefits to you and your team:

• Your team can participate in developing these profiles. They will then have more of a vested interest to ensure that the subsequent merger/acquisition is successful.
• This method also helps to ensure that you don’t miss any important criterion, and that you assign the proper weight to each one, according to the requirements of your own organization.

Here’s a sample weighted chart, based on some of the criteria presented above:

You can also establish a minimum score that is required for a candidate to qualify for your M&A consideration. And, you may want to go a step further and apply minimums to critical sub-areas.

This should give you a head-start on your M&A planning for 2008. Good luck!

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As Chinese companies gear up for their global push westward, we invite you to join them during the Annual LISA Forum Asia CHINA FOCUS 2008 in Beijing from March 10-14. LISA has an unmatched record in China and strong ties to the Chinese standards community, manufacturers and developers. CHINA FOCUS 2008 is the place to be if you are doing business in China and need to understand the issues that will impact you, or if you are a Chinese company preparing to move out of China and onto the world stage. Click here for speaking opportunities and to register.

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For this month’s issue, I took the liberty of choosing my favorite articles from 2007, in case you missed them. Here they are:

In HP on Global Digital Content Management: Today & the Future, (premium) Todd Karnig (Director of Global Content Acquisition for HP) describes in detail how an enterprise as large as LISA Member HP manages its product information and catalogs across the 100+ markets in which it serves customers. He also provides insight into how his company views the Global Content Management challenge, what it’s doing about it, and its plans for the future.

During this year’s LISA Forum Asia CHINA FOCUS in Beijing, two high-level executives described the level of expertise and trust required to make total product outsourcing work for software development. Fiona Tan (Vice President of Engineering for LISA Member TIBCO Software) and Dr. Junbo Liu (Executive Vice President of LISA Member Worksoft Creative Software Technology) provide candid insights into how their partnership in China has been extremely successful in Collaborating for Outsourcing Success: The Path Towards Outsourcing the Full Product Development Lifecycle (premium).

Anna Schlegel (previously Executive Producer for the Global Web Properties Team at VeriSign and now Director of Globalization for LISA Member VMware) entertained the audience in San Francisco earlier this year during the LISA Forum USA with how she and her team evangelized web globalization by “making waves.” Told by upper management to “just implement something like HP,” make waves they did as they produced multiple web sites in multiple languages with multiple vendors on a limited budget. Read their story in Web Globalization From the Ground Up: A VeriSign Case Study (premium).

In IP vs. Customer Satisfaction, Signe Rirdance of LISA Member Tilde introduces readers to EuroTermBank and the business case for terminology sharing. A lot of attention has recently been given to the benefits and ROI of terminology management within a company – the benefits of having everybody in a company using and contributing to the same terms are obvious. Rirdance, however, questions why terminology management should stop there.

In preparation for How To Audit Your Business Processes for Globalization Readiness, a workshop that I give in conjunction with LISA Forums, several LISA Members agreed to share the latest trends for how they are building and nurturing their global teams locally. Read what Managers, Directors and Vice Presidents from eleven global virtual teams at Alcatel-Lucent, Business Objects, EMC, HP, PerkinElmer, Rockwell Automation, SAS Institute, Schlumberger, Sun, TIBCO and Xerox have to say about how they measure their success/failure in Global Outsourcing Metrics: Building and Nurturing Global Teams Locally (premium).

Oracle and T-Systems/Deutsche Telekom are taking global virtual teamwork to the next level by providing a framework for communities to be built in order to share and leverage the knowledge and expertise that reside within each employee. To do this, both organizations are making a conscious choice to manage culture and language as a business process. In Paradigm Shift: Managing Language and Culture as a Business Process, (premium) Karen Eden (Oracle) and Philo Holland (T-Systems) describe how their organizations are leveraging communities to integrate the thousands of employees who have become colleagues over the past few years (through 35 acquisitions in the case of Oracle and the fusion of 208 very independent organizations in the case of T-Systems/Deutsche Telekom).

And one bonus article! If you’re not up-to-date on OAXAL: Open Architecture for XML Authoring and Localization, then click here to read about it. Why? According to Andrzej Zydroń (CTO for LISA Member XML-INTL), OAXAL is destined to change the way we write, translate and publish technical documentation.

Want to find out how other LISA Members solved a globalization challenge that your team is now wrestling with? Do you need help with your globalization business planning for 2008? Then send me an email at Rebecca@lisa.org, and I’ll point you in the right direction. And, if you haven’t joined LISA yet, consider doing so for 2008. Here’s the link that will tell you everything you need to know: http://www.lisa.org/info/membership.html.

That’s all for this year. Wishing all of us a prosperous and peaceful 2008.

Thanks for reading!