The Gilbane Advisor

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Author: Leonor Ciarlone (Page 5 of 13)

When is a Wiki a Whiteboard?

December 26, 2007 / / 0 Comments

A: When its a huddle.

Q: When is a huddle an environment for multilingual communication?
A: When a huddlee can dynamically change the user interface to work in her native language.

Q: Why is this interesting?
A: Because we’ve yet to see a concentrated focus on globalization requirements in the social computing and collaboration space. In fact, we’ve been wondering where is the “L” is in Web 2.0?

Q: What if you don’t speak German?
A: The company that built and manages the huddle concept (Ninian Solutions Ltd) provides a French user interface as well and according to our interview with the company, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese will follow.

Q: So how will content created by huddlers get translated?
A: Machine translation may very well prove its use within a Web 2.0 environment. Stay tuned.

Huddle

Understanding Globalization Standards: Gilbane Boston Session Summary

December 23, 2007 / / 0 Comments

The Globalization Track’s “Understanding the Globalization Standards Landscape” session provided a trio of experts to content management professionals wading through the industry’s “alphabet soup” of authoring, translation, and integration standards. Moderator Kaija Poysti deftly led the audience on a road trip through a multi-dimensional standards landscape with more than a few controversial roadblocks.
The mission was to understand how a standards-driven strategy provides an impact on customer experience, provide expert guidance on which ones really matter, and take-away advice on what to ask when evaluating solutions. Panelists Don DePalma from Common Sense Advisory (CSA), Andrew Draheim from Dig-IT!, and Serge Gladkoff from GALA delivered on the mission and then some, with commentary on which are practical, which are simply theoretical, and most importantly, which have a positive impact when adopted. Highlights:

    • On a “standards reality check”: “You have no choice on some; Some are about good hygiene, but little used; and others are not ready for prime time in their current form. However, the code and content ecosystems definitely need an injection of globalization DNA.” Don DePalma, CSA.
    • On standards benefits: “Adoption can decrease the internal cost of doing business, decrease typical business risks, facilitate business interactions, increase the value of services to clients, save on R&D and business development, and save on internal personnel training. However, there are too many private standards and too few generally-adopted public standards. Standards are notoriously difficult to develop and upon completion, they compete; be warned though, the “winning” standards not always the best ones.” Serge Gladkoff, GALA Standards Committee Chair.
    • On synergies between content and translation management: “When these technologies work together, it streamlines processes, reduces duplication and errors, and makes publishing easier. Which standards will be around tomorrow? Take a look at Translation Memory eXchange, Segmentation Rules eXchange, XML Localisation Interchange File Format (XLIFF), and TermBase eXchange.” Andrew Draheim, Dig-IT!.

Many thanks to our panel for guiding our audience through the globalization standards landscape with candor and real-world advice.

Quality at the Source: Gilbane Boston Session Summary

December 20, 2007 / / 0 Comments

The Globalization Track’s “Quality at the Source: Creating Global Customer Experience” provided advice from those in the trenches striving to do just that: bake in quality from the “get-go.” From Gilbane’s perspective, delivering customer experience is one thing; delivering global customer experience is quite another.

Our presenters understood this perspective from a “been there, doing that” frame of mind. Mary and I would like to thank Dee Stribling, Project Manager at SAS, Lori Kegel, Manager Technical Communications at Boston Scientific, and Richard Sikes, Senior Consultant & Advisor at The Localization Institute for demonstrating that global customer experience is not yet another industry phrase designed to bolster new marketing campaigns. Putting the global in customer experience is a necessity, critical for those with multinational revenue profiles, and presents tangible challenges for organizations to view the content lifecycle from a totally different perspective.

When perspective morphs to reality, organizations often unearth champions with a range of specialties that define the pillars for “going global.” Consider the following quotes from our presenters that epitomize some of the success factors for globalization in organizations that clearly get it:

  • On terminology management: “Words are the building blocks of an organization’s conceptual framework. The quality of terminology directly relates to an organization’s presence in the global community – words are an essential corporate asset!” Dee Stribling, SAS.
  • On source inconsistencies: “The whip cracks loudest at the farthest end. Follow the creative process back along the whip to minimize fluctuations at the source.” Richard Sikes, Localization Institute.
  • On globalization issues within an M&A environment: “The overall end goal is the same for both business units. There are nuances specific to each business unit based on their internal goals and objectives (portfolios are different and cultures are different). These differences are largely due to where in the translation, memory management, and content management processes a business unit is functioning; one can be at the infancy stage and one can be much further in the growth within these processes.” Lori Kegel, Boston Scientific.

Many thanks to our panel for sending the message that a satisfying customer experience happens only when communication is clear, consistent, error-free, and in the customer’s native language.

Now That’s Customer Experience: Part Duex

December 19, 2007 / / 0 Comments

I received a number of emails after my blog on Iron Mountain’s Friendly Advice Machine, including some from non-John Cleese fans who still thought it was a fun experience. I even know of some colleagues who have visited the site multiple times 😉
Still, I thought it would be interesting to get the real statistics on visits and impact from the company themselves. Iron Mountain’s Karen McPhillips, VP Marketing, answered my call for an interview. Here are some interesting excerpts:


  • Aimed at IT managers, a marketing research team developed the campaign by creating a literal “buyer persona” resulting from over 100 interviews with existing and target prospects. This was not a “closed door brainstorming” session. The team identified and aggregated a long list of common process and technology IT-based pain points to drive targeted messaging with a healthy dose of humor.

  • By end-October, the first month of release, the site received 19,000 hits and exceeded viewing expectations by 20%. Audience segmentation revealed 60% U.S.-based views and 16% Eastern Europe-based views.

  • The previous Cleese-based campaign featured the comedian as Dr. Harold Twain Weck, Director of the Institute for Backup Trauma. By the end of its run, the site had received more than one million hits from IT professionals alone.

  • The company markets the campaign globally, but it is available only in English. Given the difficulties of true context-driven translations, especially for “Cleese humor,” this seems prudent. McPhillips reports no complaints on the decision from the company’s major global markets, including France and Germany.


The company expects an 18-24 month shelf-life for the campaign.

Gilbane Boston 2007: Globalization Topics Line-up

November 27, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Mary, Kaija and I are thrilled to have an extraordinary group of presenters for the Globalization Track at Gilbane Boston.

Although they will not discuss how to properly design and implement an international online dating service, our audience will learn a lot about creating, managing, and delivering a truly global customer experience. It is never too late for a trip into Boston, especially if these topics are relevant for you.

GCM-1: Quality at the Source: Creating Global Customer Experience
Tuesday November 27, 1:00-2:30pm

GCM-2: Integrating Content and Translation Processes: Managing Global Customer Experience
Tuesday November 27, 3:00-4:30pm

GCM-3: Understanding the Globalization Standards Landscape
Wednesday November 28, 2:00-3:30 pm

GCM-4: Global Content Management Track Keynote: Making Quality Everyone’s Responsibility – Delivering Global Customer Experience
Thursday November 29, 8:30-10:00 am

The Global Content Lifecycle: Increasing the Quality Quotient

November 15, 2007 / / 0 Comments

In the Global Information Age, mere information availability no longer suffices. Today’s customer expectations demand relevant information that is culturally acceptable, appealing, and most important, understood. Delivering contextual, multilingual information – communications that make sense in the customer’s language of choice – is fundamental. Translation is a corporate requirement.

However, any company with a multinational revenue profile knows that fusing quality and translation is a significant challenge. Our take? Quality translation within the global content lifecycle can be elusive, but it is achievable. To learn more, download our latest whitepaper, “Quality In, Quality Out: The Value of Technology in the Global Content Lifecycle” and listen to the recording from the companion webinar hosted by Sajan.

We’ll also continue the quality discussion throughout Gilbane Boston’s Globalization track, particularly in the session, “Quality at the Source: Creating Global Customer Experience.”

Now That’s Customer Experience!

October 31, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Records management provider Iron Mountain is a company that has intrigued me for some time, as I’ve watched it morph from a regional to a global player in outsourcing services as well as one of the top best-of-breed RM players amidst the ECM suite and platform providers.

The company appears to have always placed great value on user education and sharing best practices as demonstrated via a continuously expanding Knowledge Center, complete with an “Ask the Expert” section. User interfaces and content breadth/depth within this area is impressive, as is the series of quarterly, role-based newsletters on various topics. Incorporating multimedia into this strategy via the Tour Center has clearly been a major investment.

So, when I ran across the latest campaign featuring one of my all time favorites, John Cleese, I figured I would check out the Friendly Advice Machine. I did not however, count on an inability to tear myself away from it.

Frankly, it is one of the best examples of customer experience techniques I have ever seen. (Adweek agrees.) Targeting mid- to senior-level IT and legal professionals, it is creative, usable, informative, and hilariously funny. It uniquely incorporates “next step” offers and calls to action that quite literally spurs your hand towards the mouse to find out “what’s behind that icon?” It bolsters the brand management strategy rather than dilutes it.

Update: Yesterday’s Stratify acquisition should help in the “bolstering” department as well….
Check it out — especially the Dreaded Whitepaper offer — and stay tuned. I’ll be interviewing the company next week about the objectives and techniques that make this campaign stand out. In terms of global customer experience, I’ll find out if Cleese has attempted to deliver it in Chinese.

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