Globalize your On Demand Business

Globalization is the process by which an organization builds strategies and competencies that operate seamlessly across national boundaries. It requires a focused integration strategy among people, languages, economies, nations, cultures and technologies, and must be considered from the very beginning of any project.

• e-business applications, products, offerings, and solutions must be attuned to individual customer preferences.
• Improved customer relationships is only achieved through listening, learning, and adapting your products.
• e-business applications, products, offerings, and solutions can no longer afford to merely monitor competitive activity and create products and services that reflect other's tactics and produce "just as good" results.
• Being in perennial catch-up mode leads to a desire to "not lose" rather than to "win". This leaves you vulnerable to competitors that you know and ones you have not yet even seen.
• Going global means localization efforts are required to make a product truly global. Think international and tailor by language and culture. One size fits all in the case of the single binary; however, there's an important need for customization using localized resources to complete the picture.
• Enhanced personalization (support of user preferences) is a key method of improving customer experience.
• As boundaries vanish regional behavior diminishes, requiring offerings tailored to appeal to local customers rather than an artificial collections of users.
• An enhanced IT infrastructure to support globalized applications is required.

Pervasive computing is built upon end-user optimized devices designed for effortless use with intuitive interfaces. The following table shows the relationship between two differing product design methodologies:

• one using a globalization (internationalization) view
• the other using a localized view

The globalized view takes all language and cultural aspects into consideration during the initial design work. The localized view only considers the singular specifics of the initial target language and culture.

Subsequent design work (and potential redesign) is required when using the localized design methodology to handle additional requirements beyond the scope of the initial work. This method of "incremental design" lengthens product development and inflates its costs.

When things go wrong

Not following the basics of globalization could result in the loss of revenues, customer satisfaction and damage your brand equity. The following are a few examples of globalization efforts that went wrong:

• Globalization was performed/implemented on a where needed, when needed (specific demand or requirement) basis using the best available technology at the time.
• Product and cross product design and implementation had no common goal or direction (technology chosen lead to differing goals e.g.. client/server).
• Differing views of responsibility by products, components and platforms left many support issues to the application layer or middleware.
• Little investment was made in system support because globalization was not viewed as system problem.
• Solutions provided were inconsistent across products and platforms and not comprehensive (partial or narrowly focused solution).
• Organizational conflicts reduced effectiveness.
• Ambiguous objectives lead to differing solutions.
• Gaps in responsibilities caused mismatches in solutions.
• Initiatives were selected with short term benefits rather than long term development and support commitments.
• Products implemented some globalization support but failed to meet objectives so they ended with poor returns on investment.
• Products not ready for all geographies at the same time caused a revenue trough in "secondary" geographies and lost potential sales or lost market share.
• Innovation by others and functional deficiencies in the product lead to "dinosaur" label and brand erosion.

Avoiding the pitfalls

There's an easy way to prevent yourself from making these basic mistakes: provide an evolving set of specifications for the design and support of globalized applications so that all communication between the user and the system (system here is the processing environment as perceived by the end user) uses the following:

• Natural language of the user.
• Language script of the user.
• Cultural preferences of the user.

If you follow these basic rules, globalization will become easier.