Recently by Leonor Ciarlone

Providing education on the business value of global information through our research is an important part of our content globalization practice. As we know however, the value of research is only as good as the results organizations achieve when they apply it! What really gets us jazzed is when knowledge sharing validates our thinking about what we call “universal truths” – the factors that define success for those who champion, implement and sustain organizational investment in multilingual communications.

Participants in our 2009 study on Multilingual Product Content: Transforming Traditional Practices into Global Content Value Chains told us that eliminating the language afterthought syndrome in their companies-- a pattern of treating language requirements as secondary considerations within content strategies and solutions -- would be a “defining moment” in realizing the impact of their efforts. Of course, we wanted more specifics. What would those defining moments look like? What would be the themes that characterized them? What would make up the “universal truths” about the remedies? Aggregating the answers to these questions led us to develop some key and common ingredients for success:

• Promotion of “global thinking” within their own departments, across product content domains, and between headquartered and regional resources.
• Strategies that balance inward-facing operational efficiency and cost reduction goals with outward-facing customer impacts.
• Business cases and objectives carefully aligned with corporate objectives, creating more value in product content deliverables and more influence for product content teams.
• Commitment to quality at the source, language requirements as part of status-quo information design, and global customer experience as the “end goal.”
• Focused and steady progress on removing collaboration barriers within their own departments and across product content domains, effectively creating a product content ecosystem that will grow over time.
• Technology implementations that enable standardization, automation, and interoperability.

Defining the ingredients naturally turned into sharing the recipes, a.k.a. a series of best practices profiles based on the experiences of individual technical documentation, training, localization/translation, or customer support professionals. Sincere appreciation goes to companies including Adobe, BMW Motorrad, Cisco, Hewlett Packard, Mercury Marine, Microsoft, and the New York City Department of Education, for enabling their product content champions to share their stories. Applause goes to the champions themselves, who continue to achieve ongoing and impressive results.

Want the details?
Download the Multilingual Product Content report
(updated with additional profiles!)

Attending Localization World, Silicon Valley?
Don’t miss Mary’s presentation on
Overcoming the Language Afterthought Syndrome
in the Global Business Best Practices track.

All businesses are facing serious disruptions from shifting global economies, technical advancements, and the need for strong, consistently branded online multinational presence. Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands has found a way to respond to these challenges without jeopardizing its ongoing business.

A world leader in the consumer lifestyle, healthcare, and lighting industries, Philips integrates technologies and design into people-centric solutions, based on fundamental customer insights and the brand promise of “sense and simplicity.” With 50,000 products, 1,800 logos, a website present in 57 countries and translated in 35+ target languages, and 500 consumer marketing managers in the Consumer Lifestyle sector, Philips’ global brand management strategy requires an adaptive system of people, process, and technology to provide a unifying influence.

This case study tells the story of how Philips has met and is keeping pace with changing and often disruptive business environments by evolving operations and communications touchpoints in a just-in-time approach that maximizes global opportunity based on consumer need.

Download the Philips story here:

Borderless Brand Management: The Philips Strategy for Global Expansion

Positioning content practices as strategic, making business cases that get funding, and selling up within the organization are among the most common challenges presented to Gilbane Group analysts in conversations with users, adopters, and buyers of content technologies. Our advice to clients always includes aligning the target investment with the strategic goals and objectives of the business. By placing content practices and infrastructures directly in the path of promises to customers and shareholders, managers improve their chances of securing financial and sponsorship support. In some cases, they can effect innovative change that not only advances their domain’s capabilities but also results in new value creation for the enterprise.

Gilbane believes that true innovation delivers new value to organizations that are willing to take the risks associated with fundamental, qualitative change. The innovations resulting from FICO's alignment of product and content development practices with business strategies are object lessons for any organization that needs to compete effectively in global markets.

Download the FICO story here: Innovation³: The FICO Formula for Agile Global Expansion

Listen to the webinar archive here: Innovating for Agility: Global Content Practices at FICO

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 -- 11:00 to 12:00 (GMT -5:00) Eastern Time

* To check the webinar time in your local area, go to: www.timezoneconverter.com.

The challenges facing FICO, a leading supplier of decision management analytics, applications and tools, will sound familiar to global organizations: the need to streamline product and content development lifecycles, support global expansion with accurate and timely localization and translation processes, and satisfy customers worldwide with consistent, quality experience. What makes FICO’s story unique is its strategic and proactive approach to addressing them.

With a successful business case based on reuse as a “first principle,” FICO is building an enterprise content infrastructure that includes XML and DITA, component content management, translation memory and terminology management, and automated publishing. Learn how FICO is aligning global content practices with the company’s business goals and objectives. If you need to spark that “aha!” moment within your organization, you won’t want to miss this webinar event. Topics:

• Reuse as the tipping point: the synergies of component approaches to product and content development
• Implementing an end-to-end global information strategy
• The value of content agility in FICO’s global business strategy

Speakers:

• Leonor Ciarlone, Senior Analyst, Gilbane Group
• Carroll Rotkel, Director, Product Documentation, FICO
• Howard Schwartz, Ph.D., VP Content Management, SDL Trisoft

Registration is open. Sponsored by SDL.

Almost, but not quite. However, I can attest to submerging myself at the end of December, and just now feeling like I am at a balancing point re: projects, speaking gigs, maintaining Twitter, diving a bit into Facebook for personal connections, remembering to check in with LinkedIn, and plain 'ol but never quiet email.

I can say with confidence that I have not reached Twitter addiction, and never considered myself a "crackberry". But... I can see how the road winds toward the seemingly endless forums devoted to this subject.

OTOH, there's a twist to this pending information overload, and it is so much more about being engaged than about being bombarded. Thus, the allure of social media. That engagement thus far has put me back in touch with old friends, spawned new ones (who I'll likely never meet), and business-wise -- helped to further a brand around the investment we've made since 2007 in raising the awareness of and best practices for content globalization.

So here's a few things I've learned. TweetDeck's been integral to my social media overload tendencies (and has a translate feature.)  Twibs is a great way to find businesses making the most of Twitter. "Getting 1000 followers," although certainly exciting in a kinda addicting way, is not really my ultimate goal. But Mr. Tweet seems to think otherwise.

And here's a few more related to "why social media in the enterprise?" This is the stuff I find intriguing and pass on here, there and everywhere. Hmmm, is there a mantra there? There's more than a few resources that stand out. Of course, our own 2008 Collaboration and Social Media and perspective on social media impact in our 2008 Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative reports.  I also find Ed Yourdon's free Using Twitter in the Enterprise slideshare a great summary. And on the subject of branding, find @GabrielRossi, @problogger, and @brandingexpert spot on and intriguing. And of course our good friend and researcher extraordinaire, Nora Barnes from the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

So my road continues -- and given my passion, I'm building a list of references and stories on the multilingual impact in social media. Got one? DM me @lciarlone on Twitter or comment here...

Check out the recorded version of our most recent webinar, Broadening Product Lifecycle Management: A Strategy for Multilingual Product Documentation.  

As moderator, a couple of things stood out for me. One had to do with the way we choose to run our webinars; basically the goal is conversation rather than playing  "Powerpoint Karaoke" (a phrase I loved while perusing the Localization Unconference site.) So although every webinar I participate in has plenty of coordination and practice, the conversation "the day of" always brings out interesting threads as a result of unfettered discussion.

In this case, Jeff Kennedy, Manager, Engineering Information and Systems at Ingersoll Rand, Club Car was kind enough to provide detail on methodologies to help calculate projected monolingual and multilingual content reuse levels, an often difficult task for any operational champion.

Vern Hanzlik, CMO from Sajan, provided clarity and perspective on how strategic globalization partners help organizations evolve in ways that make business sense, align technologies with corporate goals, and pinpoint opportunities for change. Hanzlik's comments speak directly to a "loud and clear" message from our Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative: Why Organizations Need to Optimize the Global Content Value Chain report. Organizational expectations for Language Service Providers to increase their value across the Global Content Value Chain outside of a specific component are growing, without a doubt.

My colleague Karl Kadie walked participants through the stages of our Global Content Value Chain Maturity Model, offering participants an opportunity rate their own companies according to the GCVC MM.

So, in my humble opinion, a quite interesting and revealing discussion. And one worth listening to. Access it here.

Thanks to Clay Shirky for the title; watch his Web 2.0 Expo NY presentation here.

This is also the mantra for Alltop.com, self-described as a "digital magazine rack" of the Internet. As an analyst I get a lot of stuff and peruse twice the amount I get. Now that I'm twittering (@lciarlone) and face-bookin' in addition to being a long-time LinkedIn user... well, you know the story. Not enough time in the day.

I'm looking for -- and finding -- ways to streamline keeping up to date. Alltop's darn efficient in helping me do that, organizing "stories" by category per hour. And certainly like that our own Content Globalization blog surfaces within All the Top Linguistics News.

Curious on the method and the genesis? Check it out.

First, Happy New Year from the Content Globalization team & hope your holiday season included rest and relaxation. Now back to it!

I'm not big on once a year resolutions; I like ongoing "continuations" better - i.e. keep doing what works and throw out what doesn't. In terms of our education mission, what worked best in 2008 is exactly what we set out to do via our inaugural mandate -- talk to practitioners, CIOs, strategists and fellow analysts about our view of the "globalization mandate" and understand how it fits into the "field view." So in terms of "continuations," we're increasing this commitment -- because it works.

Our 2008 experiences throughout corporate consulting gigs and Gilbane conferences underscore a simple truth -- when folks share, communities gather, and corporate operational champions for multilingual communications band together, "things" happen. And our "thing" is solidifying industry awareness that content is a vital part of web experience, customer satisfaction, and multinational expansion programs. The monolingual "one size fits all" approach? Doesn't work.

So what's with my elevator pitch title? It's an ongoing conversation we're having with our community about making the business case for content globalization strategies that are funded, valued, measured and successful. Basically, the elevator pitch for multilingual communications in five minutes or less. Here's one of our favorites, courtesy David Lee from 3M:

We are pleased to announce the Content Globalization Practice's newest case study: Broadening Product Lifecycle Management: Club Car's Strategy for Multilingual Product Communications, sponsored by Sajan.

The case study describes how Ingersoll Rand Club Car introduced and continues to strengthen a Global Content Value Chain (GCVC) focused on product content:

The largest manufacturer of golf cars and utility vehicles in the world, Club Car is a shining example of Ingersoll Rand's commitment to deliver product innovation from all perspectives.

Operational champions from technical publications groups take note! This is truly an impressive story. Download here.

Spot on!

The title of my colleague Natasja Paulssen's presentation during the Optimizing the Global Content Value Chain: Focus on Product Content session @Gilbane Boston 08.

Based on impressive results achieved between Philips and Ordina, Paulssen is specifically referring to Support and Marketing collaboration, but as the results showed... a whole lot more.

Who would have thought? Shared consumer care content including user manuals, service manuals, service scenarios, FAQ's, tips & tricks, and instructional videos within a spectacular web site available in 52+ languages. It can be done. It will be done.