Global First: how can organisations get 'global' up the CXO agenda?
I’ve just been reviewing an overview one of my team prepared about the (far too complicated for my little brain) challenges associated with translating product information at scale. You know the sort of thing - hundreds of thousands of products all held together in that promised land of a single source of truth, an MDM/PIM system, and then needing to be translated efficiently and with in market involvement into tens of languages. Loads of content, over one hundred people directly involved, lots of systems, processes, high quality, budget restricted, no time, yada yada. As you can imagine, there’s a lot that can go wrong with a project like this. My impression is that our team and our client managed the challenge well given the circumstances, but we could all have benefitted from more planning - from a chance for us to share some of the key considerations adjacent to translation as a trusted partner, rather than scrambling around trying to reactively fix downstream issues. (Allows self to plug Lingo24’s consultancy service, LocStrat, one more time.)
My immediate thought was: why didn’t we, together with our client, get a chance to plan ahead to avoid some of the complication? In most cases, translation planning is not considered necessary, and our industry has to fight not to be reactive, downstream, undervalued (I dried my eyes long ago, don’t worry). So our challenge is to make translation planning proactive, upstream and valued at a strategic level. This challenge is clearly not unique to product information - the vast majority of our regular and larger clients would, and some do, benefit from a deeper engagement with us upfront. I guess we have to ask ourselves why translation - or more accurately, global considerations across every area of a business - are so often an afterthought. And how can we help the people who handle it client-side to get the attention of the CXOs to get that global first mindset coursing through the veins of a company. I’ve got some thoughts on this (shock horror!), but would love to read any hints, tips and tricks - or indeed additional problems to solve - that you might like to share.
Leading Globalization at Expedia (ex-Netflix // Box // Yahoo)
7 年Hey Christian. All good points but you’re missing the fact that a lot of your customers are themselves fighting (or not) the fact or perception that they are a service within a bigger org and they often don’t have the upstream visibility into the dev process. It then becomes even trickier to give their LSPs access to information they may not even be privy to. My 2 cents.
CEO, VICTVS
7 年Hi Chris. I think that in the current environment that UK businesses are operating in - (particularly following the Brexit vote) CXO's who lack a global-first outlook are putting their organisations in a very precarious position in the long term. Export of goods and services should be a priority and with all of the tools and support now available, this is much easier than ever before. It's a big ask to expect client-side staff to convince their senior management to adopt a global outlook, but potential revenue and profitability from foreign markets will usually get everybody's attention so are well worth a mention... :)
Senior Vice President, Customer Success @ IDG | Revenue Growth
7 年Very cool, Mr Arno