LISA: Building a Business with a Long-term View of the Globalization Services Industry

April Singer, 20-year localization veteran from IBM. How to convince your org. to globalize.

• Nokia CTO – world will be defined not by geography but by the 'Net. *Non-G8 (had some other term I didn’t catch) countries will double the % of their GDP and become competitors and consumers by (some date).
• McKinsey Quarterly (look this up) 8 out of 10 top trends revolved around globalization.
• IBM CEO to London Fin Times: not a US company doing biz in China, but a borderless company who looks to locals as a local company.
• (I’m wishing I packed a sweater about now)
• How are we going to pretend to be a global company if the first thing we do is screw up our website?
• Google, Yahoo, eBay say their are having problems with globalization.
• (I think RS needs a “customer advocate” for each language we launch into)
• (I wish I could pull the slides I have into this post. )
• Rob Glaser, CEO, Real Networks – Customer good will is key to what makes customers gravitate towards one product or another. (this is hystraical coming from the company who I will never install software for. Maybe they are waking up to the fact they have cased off their customers with bad will).
• (take a look at IBM.com and it’s locale segmentation scheme)
• IBM thinks they can help us all. “If you are growing too fast” (they could help soak up that excess cash? ;)
• IBM said their will be one e-experience, one host, (see slide “Mission of IBM.com”)
• “We can’t possibly meet this demand [for globalization services]”. (If that is the case why are their only 70 people in this room? I don’t doubt this is important, but perhaps this conf. didn’t fit in the schedules of the masses working on this at breakneck speed. I know I felt that I should be back in H’burg working on our .de site).
• (ended with a 15 min QA)
• (It’s so cold in this room that my breath is fogging up my glasses)
• One Q: if you were in the $500M space, what would you do:* What do you do best? pick your niche, be the best in your space * Work with local, knowledgeable resources.
• (how was our call center contract in EMEA picked?)
• Q: One of your goals was a rapidly deployable site, what time frame are we talking about. A: 2 weeks for a site like one we already have.