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

27 Jun 2006

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.

#lisa2006nyc

LISA Global Summit in NYC: Intro session

27 Jun 2006

Good lord. What have they gotten me in to.

I’m sitting in the Grand Ballroom at the Roosevelt Hotel in NYC, maybe a 1/2 block from Grand Central. As near as I can tell the only “practicing” geek in the room. I say practicing because after hobnobbing with people last night I was able to see that underneath their suits there are a few former developers around here.

The most disheartening thing is there is NO WIFI. About to break out the smoke signals to communicate back to the big world outside. Needless to say there is no unofficial conf. wiki or IRC channel.

In khakis and a polo shirt I’m the least dressed up person at this gig.

A few points from the 5 minute intro.

UNESCO linking Cultural diversity to our survival much like Bio-diversity.
Only 17 countries here (there’s what? 27 countries represented at Harrisonburg Public schools?).
1 billion on the Internet. (North America 22%, Asia 35%, Europe 29%)