Chaired by Michael Anobile, Director and Co-founder Localization Industry Standards Association
According to Deloitte Touche, more than 80% of the world’s largest and most complex companies are not successful in capturing the full returns on their global investments. It estimates that “business process optimization” could increase profits for these companies by 50%. (Deloitte Research, Global Benchmark Study 2005, http://www.deloitte.com)
Managing content globally is a critical business driver in this optimization. It is the next step in transforming your organization into a globally integrated company. This means creating, managing, distributing and maintaining all intellectual property to meet multilingual and multicultural business needs when a product or service is first launched in its original version. This applies to the global company that ships and services product in thirty markets, as well as to the local hospital that must meet the critical needs of patients who require immediate medical attention in Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Vietnamese (pick your language and culture).
Added to this is the fact that the U.S. only represents around 20% of the internet population by region, with the rest of the world at 80%. What is your global content strategy to reach this 80%? Are you familiar with the current best practices for reaching these people with your web site and through the rest of the content that you produce? Do you really know how to integrate your brand into local cultures? Does your organization have a smooth process in place that allows it to deliver user interfaces, labeling and documentation that meet your customer requirements – and keep them synchronized across geographical regions, even as they are implemented and updated locally?
Also looming on the global content landscape is the ever-present mandate to reduce costs. This manifests itself in the need to streamline and eliminate redundancy in business processes, to automate manual tasks and to achieve visibility in project management. Translation, a highly manual process, is ripe for this type of process improvement. (The Gilbane Group, A Market Report on Global Content Management 2006,http://www.gilbane.com)
Yet, at the same time, we must not lose sight of the fact that the whole point of everything that we do is to communicate with our customers, partners and employees – in their preferred language and through their preferred mode of communication. The ongoing challenge is to strike the right balance between providing a satisfying customer experience in local languages/cultures vs. maintaining and enhancing one’s brand. Managing content globally means that the solutions adopted are business solutions, rather than just technical solutions. This means that they go beyond IT issues to include processes and business rules that mirror the way people work. (The Gilbane Group, Global Content Management: HP Talks the Talk of Worldwide Business, http://gilbane.com/case_studies.html)
Join the Localization Standards Association (LISA), the world’s leading professional association for organizations focused on managing content globally. We will show you why it is truly one world now in terms of content management during the LISA Forum USA at the Gilbane San Francisco 2007. Leading companies will share their strategies for supporting multilingual/multicultural needs from day 1. You will learn (1) how to improve customer satisfaction levels and increase revenues through implementing efficient processes for managing content globally, and (2) how to lower your support costs through providing this content.
How to choose the most appropriate content management solution to meet your global requirements
Authoring for global audiences: leading-edge technologies to structure information management for all audiences and data applications
Special introductory session for people who are new to global content management (concurrent)
Interactive session for global content management veterans featuring the latest developments and best practices for taking globalization strategies to the next level (concurrent)
Why more and more Global 2000 companies are adopting wikis to manage their global content
Why managing terminology is a key driver for efficient content re-use
Proven methods to attract more international search traffic to your web site, and how these will affect your bottom line.
How to culturally customize your web site and why it is critical for U.S.-based companies
The LISA Forum USA will include must-attend workshops for (1) anyone involved in choosing or implementing a content management system for global use and (2) managers who are new to Globalization Project Management. There will also be tutorial overviews of (1) how to run a globalization audit of business processes, (2) usability design for global audiences and (3) the latest on how to implement e-catalogs. The Forum will also host a vendor showcase where you can talk to the people building the solutions to meet your global content management needs.
Chair for the LISA Forum USA is Michael Anobile, Managing Director and Co-Founder of the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA).
WHO SHOULD ATTEND
Advertising VPs/Directors/Managers
Content Management VPs/Directors/Managers
Knowledge Management VPs/Directors/Managers
Localization/Globalization VPs/Directors/Managers
Marketing VPs/Directors/Managers
Product Marketing VPs/Directors/Managers
Search Marketers
Web Site Producers
LISA Forum USA
Managing Content Globally Conference Chair: Michael Anobile, Managing Director, Localization Industry Standards Association
LISA Forum USA-1: Managing Content Globally: What Works, What Doesn’t
Globalization as a recognized enterprise business practice continues to gain traction as companies expand multinational revenue goals. However, implementing a strategy poses a number of challenges that include defining localization requirements, effectively managing geographically-dispersed content creators, eliminating content "mis"management, and streamlining translation processes. In this user case study session, Sun Microsystems describes the implementation of the Starlight Platform, an enterprise initiative to unify content and translation business processes and technologies. This session will provide you with insight to help pinpoint process bottlenecks, understand how content and translation management can work together, and learn from best practices advice offered by members of the Sun project team.
Moderator:Leonor Ciarlone, Senior Analyst, Gilbane Group Speakers: Jed Michnowicz, Engineering Lead & Youngmin Radochonski, Globalization Program Manager, Sun Microsystems
LISA Forum USA-2: Authoring for Global Audiences: Closing the Gap Between Authoring and Localization
What do clients really want? Simple: good communication with their customers, because good communication creates happy, loyal customers. Multilinguality is just a feature – a quirk of geography and history, really – of good communication. Localization isn’t something that language service providers do to content – it is the content. Authors and localizers must stop believing they are uniquely qualified (or unqualified); they need to start acting as true co-custodians of a communications pipeline to global customers. To live up to that mandate, they must leverage technologies, processes and resources to create content – together – that truly meets customers’ needs.
LISA Forum USA Keynote: Global Content Management: Today and the Future
How does an enterprise as large as HP manage its product information and catalogs across the 100+ markets in which it serves its customers? What are the strategic issues in this area that are perceived by upper-level executives as most critical? Come learn from a top HP manager how the company views the Global Content Management challenge, what it's doing about it, and its plans for the future.
Speakers: Todd Karnig, Director of Global Content Acquisition, HP
LISA Forum USA-3: Shootout at the CMS Corral: Global Customers Take on CMS Vendors
A large panel of veteran users and content management system providers and integrators will share their expertise on how to choose the most appropriate content management solution for your multilingual/multicultural needs. Content management and global content management are converging – find out why and how to leverage this to expand your global web presence. Learn why global information management is a big part of today’s business process optimization and how to manage the top 5 globalization business drivers to your advantage. Panelists will also discuss how translation and localization requirements are affecting content management and web site design strategies – now and in the future.
Speakers: David Aponovich, Web Content Management Strategist, ISITE Design Christie Fidura, Senior Product Marketing Manager, SDL International Bret Freeman, Director, Content Lifecycle Solutions, JustSystems, Inc. Francis Gambino, Director of Documentation Services, IBI Michael Havill, Business Development Manager, Author-IT Kirk Hawkins, Western Regional Sales Manager, Vasont Systems Ian A. Henderson, CEO, Rubric Limited Robinson Kelly, Founder and CEO, Clay Tablet Technologies Andrew Thomas, Enterprise Product Manager, Idiom Technologies
LISA Forum USA-4: The Global Wiki Phenomenon
How are organizations using wikis to manage their global content? What new models for global virtual team collaboration are emerging from these implementations? What cost savings and time-to-market advantages are the Global 2000 realizing from this relatively new way of working together? Would it make sense for your content creators and localizers to adopt this model? Come find out from one of the true visionaries in the field.
LISA Forum Keynote: Website Google-ization: Localizing for Search Engines
The ultimate goal of every international web site is to achieve a steady stream of relevant, international traffic that leads to more revenue. Today, search engines are by far the best way to achieve this goal. According to Forrester Research, search engine marketing in Europe alone is expected to grow from USD $1.74 billion in 2005 to USD $3.73 billion by 2010. This represents a growth rate much faster than that of the U.S., which is already spending over USD $4 billion per year on search engine marketing. This presentation will demonstrate how choosing proper terminology is a highly valuable marketing tool that enables search engines to properly index and rank international web sites for language or country-specific searches, thus ensuring a continuous flow of highly qualified traffic. It will also cover how companies can generate more revenue from each localized web site, and thereby increase the ROI of their localization budgets.
LISA Forum USA-5: The Next Localization Frontier: Designing Culturally Customized Web Sites
Do you want to effectively tap global online markets? Would you like your international web sites to be easy to navigate, culturally consistent and appealing to your international online customers? Then you must go beyond translation and localization to embrace cultural customization. This presentation will provide practical guidelines on how to design culturally customized web sites that resonate with the cultural context of target countries. The presenter’s research over the past five years, across more than 10 countries and 900 companies, has shown that cultural customization of web sites leads to higher ease-of-use, a better attitude toward the sites and higher purchase levels. Attendees will learn (1) how to effectively target international online customers and (2) how companies are culturally customizing their international web sites. They will also be provided with a powerful cultural customization tool to effectively customize their web sites for different countries.
Speakers: Dr. Nitish Singh, Associate Professor of Marketing, California State University
LISA Forum USA-6: Web Globalization - Case Study: From 4 to 19 Sites with a Limited Budget
How do high-tech companies actually produce multiple web sites in multiple languages with multiple vendors on a limited budget? Anna Schlegel, Executive Producer for VeriSign, Inc., will share how the company turned its global content around through building the right team and attaining appropriate funding. She will also explain the role that controlled language plays, along with how and why VeriSign invested in a globalization management system.
Speakers: Anna Schlegel, Executive Producer, Localization and Global Web Properties, VeriSign, Inc.
Pre-conference Tutorial
How to Audit Your Company for Globalization Readiness Rebecca Ray, Managing Editor of the Globalization Insider and Co-Author of Doing Business in the USA
Why should your products/services/processes be designed and ready to “go global” from day 1? The answer is simple: three-quarters of the human race is bilingual and global trade is at USD 11 trillion and growing. Performing a Globalization Audit will go a long way towards ensuring success outside of whatever you may call your home market. Learn:
5 questions to ask every team to help unleash the globalization potential of its intellectual assets and workflow processes
How to escape the trap of classifying globalization as a cost, rather than as an investment
3 steps to enable your organization to view globalization as just another business process to be integrated
Why the business process required to make the jump from Indianapolis, Indiana (USA) to Nanjing, China, and vice-versa, is basically the same
Why and how your organization can do better than just “going global” division-by-division
How to leverage the intellectual capital around you to expand into international markets faster and more smoothly
How to perform a Globalization Audit at the strategic and departmental levels
LISA FORUM USA SKILLS WORKSHOP Project Management for Globalization Professionals Kenneth (Sandy) McKethan, Globalization Project Manager, IBM Tivoli Systems
Globalization project management is not a black art. But it might as well be, given the level of misunderstanding often associated with it. Globalization Project Managers are often left to make their own way, ill-equipped to meet external challenges from tight, shifting schedules, scope creep, inflexible budgets and unrealistic customer expectations. Internal challenges can be equally daunting. These typically include lack of process awareness and support on the part of development, sales and management. In the interactive workshop, case study inductive analysis and team exercises will be used to impart practical project management principles. Learn:
Practical ways to not only survive as a Globalization Project Manager, but to productively assume greater control over projects.
Expectation, scope and communication management
How to define deliverables and realistic milestones
Ways to deal positively and productively with change
