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In this issue…
EditorialEast-Meets-West Through Virtual and Face-to-Face Collaboration
It was great to see so many of you from the LISA Globalization Community in Beijing during last month’s LISA Forum Asia CHINA FOCUS. For those of you who missed it, scroll down a bit, and you will find a detailed summary and analysis of this year’s four dominant themes (innovation, open source standards, the push westward from Chinese companies and the huge opportunity that the second billion internet users will offer to all of us.
With a bit more than three months until the Beijing Olympics, U.S. baseball games are being played, and it seems that the entire country has been taught to smile – and mean it. One more twist on the East-Meets-West scenario. In Virtual Collaboration Across the Globe: Global Cognition for Learning Without Borders (premium), Dr. Barbara Moser-Mercer (VP of the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Geneva) shares new research that can help us to understand how people work together virtually to construct knowledge across cultural and linguistic boundaries, and thus enable us to build more effective multicultural teams in the business world. The key is the difference between adaptive and routine expertise. Dr. James Wei (President of E-C Translation Ltd.) has been bridging the East-West divide for much of his career as a Chinese manager and entrepreneur. In China: Localize Central (Just Give Us a Little More Time …!, Wei paints a picture of the current market for language services in China, along with a candid assessment of its “growing pains” as it matures to meet the future demands of Chinese companies preparing to expand on a global scale. Back in the West in California, LISA is preparing to host the LISA Forum USA 2008 (click here for the agenda and special offers). I personally invite you to join other globalization professionals to find out how they are moving on from content to integrate globalization in the back office (e.g., customer support, follow-on sales, etc.) to hit the ground running on day 1. Our theme will be Building a Globally Integrated Organization: Reducing the Learning Curve. With keynote sessions by LinkedIn, CNET, Cisco, Adobe and IBM, the Forum is shaping up to be a dynamite event (sorry for the hyperbole, but it’s true!). Investigate how the Web 2.0/3.0 solutions and communities surfacing from the social networking and mobile arenas will affect how you design, create, manage and distribute your content across the enterprise and across the globe. Learn how companies are managing their business processes globally, even as they acquire and merge other companies. And then explore how to apply all of this to developing business cases and long-term market entry and support strategies for Emerging Markets. LISA ANNOUNCEMENTS It’s Time to Submit Your Web Site for the LISA’s 3rd International Best International Web Support Sites Awards Program! Previous winners include ATI, Cathay Pacific Airlines, Cisco Systems, Dell, HP, Intel, McAfee, Microsoft, Sony, ViaTraining and Xilinx. All companies that enter the awards program – held in conjunction with the Association of Support Professional (ASP) – will receive a detailed evaluation of their international support site based on 25 criteria, along with comments and feedback from the expert judges. Click here for more information and to enter. Visit LISA’s Completely Redesigned Web Site If you haven’t done so already, you must visit LISA’s completely redesigned web site (www.lisa.org). We have made it much, much easier for you to find the data you need and to network with other colleagues in the globalization community. We encourage you to use it as resource to educate the rest of your organization vis-à-vis globalization and the value that you’re adding by helping your colleagues to globalize their business processes. While you’re visiting our new web site, please explore our newest publications – better data to help you make better decisions:
And if you haven’t participated in the LISA Globalization Professionals Salary Survey, or it’s time to udpate your data, please click here. The data is always up-to-date and always live. LISA PARTNER ANNOUNCEMENTS Here are some other LISA Partner events that you may be interested in: DITA: Getting Started Workshop The workshop will cover the basics of creating DITA topics, assembling them into maps, creating relationship tables and preparing for final output. Everything is hands-on. You are required to bring a laptop computer and sample documentation. Click here for more details. Documentation and Training Conference Series May 6-9 in Vancouver, BC, Canada FIT XVIII Annual World Congress in Shanghai LISA is partnering with FIT (International Federation of Translators) and the Translators Association of China (TAC) this year to organize the terminology and best practice sessions during its XVIII Annual World Congress in Shanghai (August 4-7). LISA Members will receive a substantial discount when they sign up for the Product and Services Exhibition. To learn more, click here. The Content Wrangler Community The Content Wrangler Community (http://thecontentwrangler.ning.com/?from=GI) is the new social network dedicated to people who value content as a business asset, worthy of being effectively managed. It’s the place where technical communicators, medical and science writers, marketing pros, content management gurus, indexers, online community managers, document engineers, information architects, localization and translation pros, e-learning pros, taxonomists, bloggers, documentation and training managers, and content creators of all types hang out. It's much more than a blog. It's a place to join peers, to share, to collaborate, to contribute and to find information. Check it out! LISA Forum Asia: CHINA FOCUS Offshoring Globalization and IT Services to China Just a few years ago, China was a global manufacturing center and a growing market set to become a leading global economic force. Few saw it as a leader in the provision of information services. This has all changed. China has gained increasing recognition as a regional center for technology development, globalization and business ventures. It is now on the verge of being seen as a leading center in the world for new technology ventures and emerging global brands. China is fast becoming the place for quality-conscious manufacturers and designers to turn for resources. We have only seen the start of the trend for people to look to China for end-to-end services. There were four dominant themes during last year’s CHINA FOCUS in Beijing:
The buzz this year focused on the following four issues:
In the form of R&D Centers set up by Western high-tech companies that continue to hire the best and the brightest to design and build global products and … The recognition by Chinese IT outsourcing companies (and the Chinese government) that their key differentiator will be innovation. Remaining competitive cannot be found in remaining the least expensive option or in improving upon the Indian modeling for outsourcing. They have yet to apply and adapt the best practice that is already available to them. By 2012, almost half of the world’s internet users will be in Asia Pacific. But, where will the content come from? Language should not be a pre-requisite for accessing knowledge. SMT (statistical machine translation) may be part of the solution. Innovation, Innovation, Innovation! Executives at companies like Adobe, Cisco, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, Sun and TIBCO no longer worry much about IP protection in China. They’re now focused on providing resources for building their own teams in China and giving them ownership and responsibility for global products that will be sold worldwide. At the same time, they are integrating their worldwide teams with their Chinese outsourcing partners earlier and earlier in the product design and development cycles. The key objective is to gain access to the superb talent in China, to nurture it and to hold onto it for as long as possible. The following statistics say it all: 80% of Intel’s revenues are now generated from non-English speaking markets HP derives 67% of its revenues from international sales If you work for IBM, only 40% of your paycheck comes from the U.S., while 60% is generated from other markets In Eclectic Notes on Setting Up a Company, Dr. Jan Gronski (Managing Director of Cisco’s China R&D Center) shared how Cisco has gone from 0 to 600 employees in less than three years at the Center, and why China is now a center for global product development for Cisco. It’s difficult to describe in thirty minutes how to set up a company, but Gronski provided an excellent overview with insights and advice that you normally can’t find in the business press. Gronski’s most important task was – and is – hiring, developing and maintaining talent. He offers the following advice:
If you want the best and the brightest Chinese engineering talent, go recruit at Berkeley and Stanford in the U.S.! Gronski also considers it to be a waste of time to recruit at the best schools in China, since the competition for those graduates is so intense that Cisco can’t hire the best of the best. However, “best” is a relative notion in this case. Instead, Cisco recruits at schools that are considered to be second or third. That’s because it can hire the top of the class at those institutions, and the ROI for those students will be better than for the bottom 1/3 of the students from a top university. Cisco is not a research institution, so this strategy makes the most sense. A typical engineer who graduates from a good university naturally wants to join a good company. Within three to four years, s/he wants to be a people manager. If s/he doesn’t reach this point, then the question becomes (to put it in Chinese terms), “What will my mother-in-law say? I’m a failure!” (Refer to Gronski’s presentation at www.lisa.org/events/2008beijing/presentations for advice on how to handle this one!) For more insights into how Cisco is actually implementing its R&D strategy on the ground in China, read Cisco China: Building the Next Global Center for Product Localization (based on interviews with Dr. Gronski and Amy Zhang, Director of Engineering for the Cisco R&D Center). Fiona Tan (Vice President for Engineering at TIBCO Software) shared Best Practices for Managing Growth in China Outsourcing. TIBCO’s China Development Center (CDC) was established in December 2005 in partnership with VanceInfo (formerly Worksoft). TIBCO set it up this way because it already has a captive engineering center in India, and it did not want to replicate that model in China. VanceInfo handles all of the issues related to labor laws, provides security, etc. In other words, TIBCO outsources everything from product design all the way through creating technical documentation in English and supporting global products from China. The CDC is now TIBCO’s largest R&D center outside of Palo Alto An initial team of twenty engineers worked on development and QA for six products. Currently, VanceInfo provides a team of 190 engineers to work on the full product lifecycle for over forty products. Tan stressed that the CDC engineers are involved in the delivery and support of more than 70% of TIBCO’s products. They work together with the other development teams in the U.S. and the U.K. The CDC is now TIBCO’s largest R&D center outside of Palo Alto (California). For candid insights into why the partnership between TIBCO and VanceInfo in China has been so successful, read Collaborating for Outsourcing Success: The Path Towards Outsourcing the Full Product Development Lifecycle, an interview with Tan and Dr. Junbo Liu (Executive Vice President of VanceInfo). However, the effective management of offshore teams became an issue at one point. As the CDC grew, more and more managers at the company’s headquarters were involved with managing offshore teams. This requires management overhead on both sides. In addition, most of the U.S. managers had never managed international teams before, and certainly not offshore. On the other side of the ocean, most CDC engineers promoted to manager had little management experience. It boiled down to a general lack of management experience on both sides. As a result, TIBCO has invested in more management training for all parties involved. Product development is difficult to measure, so TIBCO has developed a set of product release metrics in the form of qualitative measures covering three subcategories to measure its offshore teams: deliverables, schedule and quality. The metrics must be objective and easily calculated, e.g., (1) has a design document been written and approved? (2) the number of severity 1 defects reported by a customer on a particular release; (3) the number of days slipped between target and actual GA (General Availability) dates. The data must also be readily available in a database so that automated reports can be run at the end of a release to compute a scorecard for the team. This has worked so well for the CDC that it will be rolled out company-wide. Headquarters executives still view IP protection as the #1 risk to offshoring in China – rightly or wrongly IP is the most important asset for a software company like TIBCO to protect. Executives at headquarters still view this as the #1 risk to offshoring in China – rightly or wrongly. Tan pointed out that this is probably due to lack of up-to-date information and outdated advice in the media. NOTE: LISA is preparing a soon-to-be-released Industry Insights Report entitled, The New Breed of Chinese Localizers: Building Global Champions, which will address many of the myths about outsourcing in China that are still circulating. To address this issue head-on, TIBCO follows a policy of educate and monitor. It reminds all employees worldwide about IP protection on a regular basis and educates its engineers to protect all source files, documents and company-sensitive information. It also reminds them not to engage in behavior that may compromise the company, e.g., downloading illegal software, movies, etc., which is fairly common in China. TIBCO now deploys tools to monitor bandwidth usage and sites visited. It is also investigating security software to manage sensitive data and to prevent IP leakage. However, it has never experienced any IP leakage. China is definitely waking up to its immense power to innovate. On Wednesday night, March 18, during the Forum, CCTV International reported during its BizChina program that “Innovation isn’t necessarily the result of good science. People need to inspire and lead for innovation to happen.” It also reported that this will happen faster than anyone expects in China. To explore innovation from the Chinese perspective, executives from five of the top Chinese outsourcing companies presented a panel entitled, China’s Evolution from Language Services to Global Software Solutions Providers. Panelists included Sophia Wang (Beyondsoft), Dr. Simon Horng (Inventec), Grace Chen (Oceansoft), Cyrill Eltschinger (Softtek China, formerly I.T. United) and Junbo Liu (VanceInfo Technologies). China is now at the crossroads of two key trends: innovation and the ability to provide the best tech talent in the world Cyrill Eltschinger (Softtek China) presented an overview of the global software solutions sector in China, with lots of facts and figures. According to Eltschinger, “If you’re not in China … you’re really not in the game.” This applies to outsourcing, as well as to all industry sectors. China has gone through massive growth and is now at the crossroads of two key trends. Innovation is the first one. The country is no longer a “copy and paste” center for manufacturing. As just one example, there are over 550 million mobile users now in China, so the services and products that we will see in the West eventually for our phones are being introduced first in China. The second trend is the ability to tap into China for high-value, high-end skill sets and engineering services. The tech talent is phenomenal in the country. By 2006, China had arrived at the point of “frontier innovation,” i.e., creating new technologies (not just technology improvements to enhance products/processes through in-house R&D). According to the China Daily, the outsourcing industry is “the next big thing” in the country. One of its recent reports (June 22, 2007) states that the sector can generate four million jobs and USD 56 billion in revenue by 2015. While global IT outsourcing is predicted to grow at a 20% CAGR (as mentioned above) the Chinese outsourcing market is expected to grow at 50.2% between 2007 and 2010! China is now clearly the tech talent leader In 2004, there were around 189,000 computer science and software graduates in China (PRC only). By 2007, it had grown to between 350,000 and 400,000. The message here is that India continues to steadily produce around 140,000 graduates, while China has continued to grow exponentially. One other snapshot: in 2005, China produced around 250,000 graduates in this area; India 120,000; and the U.S. only 75,000. China is now clearly the tech talent leader. Top 4 concerns in considering offshoring and services to China
Flat out, this is no longer an issue. Don’t confuse consumer goods with doing business with trusted partners with all the necessary controls in place. Some of the smartest and brightest talent in the world now graduates from Chinese universities. Other markets may have this issue, but China does not. The culture is based on relationships. We’re experiencing 2nd generation outsourcing right now Grace Chen (Chairman and CEO at Oceansoft International) characterizes what’s going on now as “2nd generation outsourcing, where the industry is moving from a “British Empire”-focused industry with India servicing the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia and Singapore, to a truly global industry that is based on supply and demand worldwide. According to McKinsey, India will most likely continue to be the leader for awhile, but its relative position is falling rapidly, in spite of its rapid growth. In 2004, India delivered 80% of all U.S. outshoring. By 2006, this had dropped to 59%. And by 2010, India at USD 60 billion will only represent 20% of the global market. By that same year (2010), it is estimated that 30% of the Fortune 500 firms in the U.S. will source from three or more countries in a meaningful way. This is being driven primarily not by cost savings, but by the need to match the right resources to the right job. The word “de-risking” has entered the vocabulary of the executives who run the Fortune 500. It means: We don’t want to have too many eggs in one basket geographically. We want to spread our risk in terms of labor availability, political/economic changes, terrorism, etc. How can China nab the 800-lb. gorilla and still maintain a successful relationship? Today’s challenge for China will be how it globalizes itself. To take the best from others who have gone before and to adapt it through innovation. At a company-level, it’s a question of how to “nab the 800-lb. Gorilla,” while still maintaining a successful relationship. The gorilla will choke you if you don’t have good processes in place. At it’s most basic, outsourcing is like any relationship. The concept of “nurture” is often strange to IT professionals, but successful relationships require constant nurture, attention and commitment. Around the year 2000, there was a definite shift in the globalization services market in China, as Chinese outsourcers transformed their business models to meet client needs in the area of product design, R&D and software development, application development and maintenance, and business process outsourcing services. They have proven that not only can they service the Chinese market, but they can also help companies develop products/services for global market consumption. In the meantime, India is still wrestling with linguistic and cultural adaptation challenges in this area. “Routine” expertise and “adaptive” expertise are very, very different As China wakes up to its immense power to innovate, it will need to recognize that there are two types of expertise, according to new research from the University of Geneva: routine expertise and adaptive expertise, and they are very different. According to Dr. Barbara Moser-Mercer, routine expertise is the knowledge that people develop from reading books and from being taught through traditional teaching methods. This allows a routine expert to solve familiar problems on a routine basis. However, when this same routine expert faces an unknown problem, he or she becomes a “fish out of water,” finding it very difficult to meet the challenge. “Adaptive experts,” on the other hand, are immediately able to apply creativity and are competent and comfortable in these new situations. In fact, they thrive on them. You can’t apply what you know about face-to-face teams to virtual teams In Virtual Collaboration Across the Globe: Global Cognition for Learning Without Borders, Moser-Mercer shared how she and her team have used this new research to build a virtual learning environment (VLE) for training interpreters. She provided scientific evidence for how new types of knowledge are constructed when different cultures collaborate virtually. Using the example of East-West collaboration, she shared how evidence suggests that the knowledge constructed in such culturally blended groups of learners is superior in quality to that constructed by monocultural groups. She also described how the insights gained from the design of multicultural VLEs can be applied to virtual, multicultural work environments in order to improve team efficiency and to access global markets. Open Source Standards, including language standards, are important in China, and becoming moreso Dr. Christian Galinski (Director of Infoterm and Secretary of the ISO/TC 37 Secretariat) was joined by Changqing Zhou (China National Institute of Standardization–CNIS) and Changqi Huang (Translators Association of China) for the panel entitled, Chinese Standardization Activities in Language Processing. Due to China's steady market growth and the progress being made by Chinese multinationals entering the global market, the Chinese government is focusing on the strategic aspects of open standards, particularly in the translation and terminology areas. Galinski (from a Western perspective) and Zhou and Huang (from a Chinese perspective) discussed the work being sponsored by the government, and how these activities will impact China's globalization efforts and the localization industry. There were six very important messages from these panelists:
ISO, Chinese National Standards and LISA are now working very closely together The executives at the Chinese companies that are now pushing westward are struggling to recognize the value of globalization for their own operations Based on the questions and issues posed by CHINA FOCUS attendees this year and last year in Beijing, it is clear that Chinese companies moving westward are struggling with the same issue that their Western counterparts have in the past: recognizing the value of globalization for their own operations. Groups like LISA can help shorten this learning curve and support Chinese executives and their management teams to apply and adapt the best practice that is already available to them. In Creating an Executive Business Case for Globalization: An Exercise in Social Engineering, Alison Toon (Translation and Localization Manager for Content Management Services at HP) and Dale Schultz (Globalization Expert at IBM) provided excellent, practical advice for building and implementing business cases to obtain management buy-in for globalizing an organization’s business processes. They explained how translation and localization are often managed at an operational, but not a strategic, level. They focused on how to bring visibility to top management by learning how to demonstrate the value provided through enabling your colleagues, upper-level managers and your CEO to be excited about what you are accomplishing for the organization through globalizing its business processes. And, when all else fails, Schultz provided practical advice on how and when to use the “big stick approach.” How about reminding your “cubicle-mates” that 60% of each one of their paychecks is generated by markets outside of the U.S. (if they work for IBM)?! The second billion internet users are coming, and they won’t be speaking English By 2012, almost half the world’s internet users will be in Asia Pacific. But, where will the content come from? Language should not be a pre-requisite for accessing knowledge. SMT (statistical machine translation) may be part of the solution. In Using Automated Translation Software to Translate Dynamic Content, Daniel Marcu (CEO of Language Weaver) explained how content is starting to undergo a significant shift, from that of static (updated periodically after several rounds of review) to dynamic content (created by users around the world). Dynamic content = more content in more languages This shift is empowering users globally, but it is also increasing the demand for usable, real-time translations. Marcu shared why dynamic content is becoming more important; how automated translation is being used to translate it; the types of applications and deployments that are best suited for automated translation; and why statistical syntax represents the next generation of automated translation. Dion Wiggins (CEO of Asia Online) reminded the audience that Asia already has far more users than any other region in the world. With its relatively low penetration rate at only 11.8%, Asia already accounts for 38.7% of all internet users. While other markets are reaching their saturation point (e.g., 70% now for N. America), Asia is just getting started. According to the figures presented by Wiggins (see slide 3), N. America has 18% of the world’s users, Europe has 26.4% and Latin America 9.6%. In Is MT Ready for Real-World Use? Wiggins described how his company has built its own MT system and developed huge (and he means really huge) corpora to ensure the quality for languages such as Thai, Bahasa Malay, Bahasa Indonesian, Tagalog and Vietnamese. His point was: Localized content is now required to really begin bridging the Digital Divide In other words, once MIT courseware is available in Vietnamese, then we can really claim that we’re making progress. Wiggins also issued an urgent call to action to protect the corpora we have and to research new means of corpus generation and sharing that will benefit all global communities. Much of the content that is now available through the internet is “polluted” because much of the data now consists of “translations” of mixed languages instead of a single target language. This is because, more and more, users are copying and pasting MT output as human output. Localized content on Support.intel.com received more than 6 million hits in 2007 Hao Li (Intel Software Localization Team) explained how his team is making it possible for 80% of Intel’s revenues to be generated outside of the U.S. in Localization Process Automation and Optimization. Intel has millions of web pages, and its TMs (translation memories) now exceed 10 GB. According to Li, Intel’s challenge is how to best utilize its localization assets to generate cost savings and quality improvements. It is now using SMT (statistical machine translation) to generate thousands of its web support pages. Editor’s Note: The Intel site was a 2006 winner in the LISA Ten Best International Web Support Sites Awards. If you are a LISA Member, click here to download the book in which Intel explains how they designed and implemented the site, and the challenges they faced. If you are a non-Member, you may purchase the book at the same URL. As always, there were many other excellent presentations, case studies and workshops, with a focus on globalization testing, GB18030 compliance, how to improve your source content and making DITA fit the environment of China’s global companies. If you are a LISA Member, you can access all of the presentations by clicking here. Please contact admin@lisa.org to find out how to access the presentations if you are not a LISA Member. And remember … The second billion internet users are coming, and they won’t be speaking English … |
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  23-27 June 2008  |
