One World IT
- Article 13 of 77
- Information Age, July 2001
Managing an IT infrastructure on a global scale can be a nightmare – as many CIOs will testify
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With those systems expected to run globally, there are issues of culture to consider if these applications are used by employees and by customers. “If you're providing a trading platform offering global access through the Internet,” says CommerceQuest's Watkins, “you need to consider the issues involved in cross-border trading. These include currency and taxation, but also overcoming incompatible restrictions for the sale of goods or provision of specific services in individual countries.”
And a company with global interests might find it has to develop sets of technologies appropriate for only a few countries if it wants to trade there. “The Germans and the English have different approaches to electronic payment at point of sale,” says Watkins. German consumers are very keen on using systems involving SMS messages on their mobile phones for payment, for example. “This requires mobile technology payment offerings, for example, to be customised,” he adds.
CULTURAL MINEFIELD
“Don't have a black border round a web page in Japan. It's insulting,” advises Ben Salama, vice president for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Unibase, a US company that helps companies “extend their global reach” by getting the companies IT systems and web sites to work in different languages. Rationalising a company's global infrastructure and applications may not be possible if the systems are not able to present information in a language the employees can understand. Even if the official language of a company is English, it may be the first language of only a minority of employees. Dutch bank ABN Amro, for example, has 3,500 branches and 110,000 employees worldwide; English is the first language of only 20% of its staff, yet is the official language of the company.
“If you have information centralised by a knowledge management system, it can provide great information for sales and HR teams, providing they can understand it,” maintains Salama. “What we're finding is that companies that have been global for a long time have processes for creating hard-copy offline for local materials. But, in the rush to create web-based content, the traditional methods have broken down - you might produce a brochure twice a year, but have to update Internet content every day.”
Many organisations have web sites only in English or with US and UK customers in mind. Others have content produced centrally for all the subsidiary web sites, but with little impact. “It's a fact that users spend twice as long on a web site in their natural language and they're three times more likely to buy things,” says Salama. But devolving content production to local offices is not necessarily the solution either. Some companies have many subsidiaries, each in charge of their own web server and content, but “the millions of dollars of marketing budget spent by the corporate headquarters are being diluted in the translation or not being acted upon,” adds Salama.
In addition to a set of programming libraries that let software developers internationalise their offerings easily, Unibase's software enables a company to maintain a central database of text that contains templates for all of its web pages worldwide. It links these to a database of text used by the company in previous documents and which human translators have converted into different languages. Using a content management and review process, together with fuzzy matching for slight variations, the system scans new documents for text that has already been translated and pulls the appropriate sentence from the database for alternative languages. Anything not previously translated is passed to human translators then fed into the system for future use. The central server then combines the different languages into the templates and distributes them to all the subsidiary web servers.
“Typically, 70% of content can be produced centrally, 30% locally, we find,” says Salama. “But we believe very strongly that an enormous amount of responsibility has to be in subsidiaries; even if the content is produced centrally and hosted centrally, the subsidiaries need to be involved in the review process. You can't assume the UK marketing team will understand tln Hn in' in China or even France.”
By devolving power to local offices after specifyugglobal hardware platforms and software that can .4 deliver in multiple languages, an organisation is able to take advantages of global economies of scale. Avon's Edelman, for example, set up a cross-functional Centre of Excellence to put the business case for all the changes she was making. It was able to show that changes to the core business processes and systems were dropping lead times and inventory levels - proving to her superiors that the integration was paying for itself. These results convinced the management to back Edelman's ERP project.
Seagate's changes, meanwhile, have meant the company has been able to increase the sum of cash available to buy back outstanding shares from the stock exchange and set itself up as a private company again. But these savings can only go so far - if a company tries to force one set of applications and one language on its employees and customers, it may find that it ends up losing money instead.
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