ENLASO

Location: Language Technology Center: Articles: LISA: Nexus for Companies Going Global

CEOs overwhelmingly believe that revenue growth is their number one priority: four out of five CEOs (83%) now believe that revenue growth is the most important path to boosting financial performance over the next three years. And what do they see as the two key drivers for this growth? New and differentiated products and services (nearly two-thirds) and new markets (55%). Your Turn: The Global CEO Study 2004 (IBM Consulting Service) (456 CEOs worldwide across all industries were surveyed)

Revenue growth and being responsive to customers are not just for the “Big Guys.” These are critical issues, as well, for the 80% of all U.S. companies considered to be SMEs (small- to medium-sized enterprises) and the 20 million SMEs providing two-thirds of Europe’s private employment. However, smaller enterprises cannot afford to go through the learning curve of the Big Guys. They must get it right and do so the first time, perhaps even within their first year of business, as the world increasingly faces off between three huge trading blocks: China and the rest of Asia, the EU and the Americas.

Can your customer service organization efficiently its non-English emails every day?

Global trade is at USD 9.1 trillion and growing (based on the latest figures just released by the World Trade Organization on October 25). But to get from Indianapolis, Indiana (USA) to Nanjing, China (or from Nanjing to Indianapolis, for that matter), there are some challenges that your organization must meet successfully, not the least of which will be preparing your business processes to go global. For example, can your customer service organization efficiently process all non-English emails received on any given day? Preparing your products and services to go global will be the easy part; it’s your internal business processes company-wide that will take the most work.

Up-front, it is important not to get caught in the trap of classifying translation (or localization, or globalization or whatever you want to call it) as a cost. Big mistake – preparing your products, services and processes to go global is an investment with a return many times over, when done properly. After all, isn’t the ROI on a Chinese or Japanese version of your product really that entire market, rather than just the incremental sales? You bet it is, and your business planning should reflect this.

Your organization can do better than “going global” on a division-by-division basis.

The risk is that your organization will be left to solve the “go global” challenge on a division-by-division or department-by-department basis. However, there is no reason for managers to make the classic mistake of choosing the long route when it comes to designing, marketing, selling, supporting and maintaining your products/services worldwide. Leverage the resources available to you, so that everyone in the organization has the right tools and resources up-front to go global.

Reject the syndrome of reinventing the wheel when going global.

You’re not alone, and many have gone before you, some much more successfully than others. In addition to companies such as ENLASO, there are also professional associations that can point the way as you go and stay global. There is no need to reinvent the wheel when you can network with those who have faced similar challenges in other organizations. One such organization is the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA), a non-profit professional association based in Geneva, Switzerland.

LISA can serve as the nexus for companies as they go global.

LISA serves as the nexus for the many organizations engaged in supporting businesses as they transform themselves into global enterprises. These include customers, governments, standards groups, research and consulting firms, language technology developers and globalization service providers. LISA’s members are willing to candidly share what they did right and what they did wrong as they went global (and as they continue to do so) through (1) forums and strategy summits, (2) setting standards for going global, (3) Best Practice Guides, (4) surveys, (5) white papers, (6) a web site that averages 15 million hits annually and (7) a monthly publication, the Globalization Insider, that averages 15,000 unique readers.

With more than 200 corporate and government members representing 32 countries, LISA presents a clear and unbiased view of the challenges associated with globalization, the standards that apply to the resolution of those challenges, coupled with the worldwide resources available to focus on these issues. For more information, please click here.

As the IBM Survey documents, your organization’s maturing into a global enterprise will take place within a global ecosystem, with multiple points of intersection among business, government and academia. During the first Executive Language Summit held recently in Paris, the European Commission, the Canadian Government, the African Development Bank, the International Accounting Standards Board, IBM, Hewlett Packard, AILIA, LISA and BrandLink International launched a global initiative mandated to position language and related technologies and standards at the forefront of global communication as the basis for worldwide economic growth.

Help implement multilingual communication as worldwide policy.

As Karl-Johan Lönnroth, Director General of the European Commission’s Directorate General for Translation, pointed out, “Without focus and funding, we face a critical decline in our ability to develop countries, markets and economies.” The Executive Language Summit confirmed that the world is now a collection of global villages, each entitled to market access and information in its own language and adapted to its own cultural preferences. Multilingual communication is the business imperative in the 21st century and will serve as the basis for increased world trade, the free flow of labor and open markets.

I invite you to join LISA and the participants in the Executive Language Summit in taking this message forward to include more governments, global institutions and businesses in our drive to increase language education and to implement multilingual communication as worldwide policy.

Rebecca Ray (Rebecca@lisa.org) is the Global Business Editor for the Globalization Insider and is co-author of the book, Doing Business in the USA: Marketing and Operations Strategies for Success. She has been a pioneer in designing, testing, adapting and marketing software worldwide for companies such as IBM, Netscape Communications, Symantec and Sun Microsystems. Rebecca is fluent in English, French and Spanish and proficient in Portuguese and Turkish.