Conference Abstracts
(click on the '
' icon to get to the papers)
Keynote: Shifts in the Global Business Landscape:
Opportunities and Threats for 21st-Century Organisations
Andrea Saveri, Director, Institute for the Future
Click [here] for the abstract.
Workshop: Doing Business Internationally
Ted Dale, Earnest Gundling, co-Managing Directors, Meridian Associates
To interact and conduct business effectively across national and cultural boundaries, business personnel must examine their own assumptions regarding the best ways to conduct business. The best way to perform even the most ordinary business activities, such as communicating ideas, building teamwork, and obtaining input and feedback from others, can vary dramatically depending on the culture in which people live and operate.
This session will cover a number of key issues and strategies that should be considered in order to conduct business more effectively around the world. Some of the topics that will be covered include:
New perspectives on cross-cultural interactions
- Self-understanding: American Cultural Behaviour and Values, Complex Historical Factors, U.S. Workforce
- Stereotyping vs. Informed Judgements
- Key Differences in Behaviour and Values
Cultural proficiency as a discipline
- Developing a Global Mindset
- Intercultural Process Skills
- A Model for Analysing Key Dimensions of Culture
Skills for conducting Business with people from the target country
- Effective Communication Strategies
- Expected Protocol: Handling Introductions, Initial Meetings, and Business Entertaining
- Productive Meetings
- Comparative Negotiating Styles
- Building Effective Business Relationships
- Presenting Information and Persuading
- Obtaining Accurate and Complete Information
Global Leadership
Ted Dale, Earnest Gundling, co-Managing Directors, Meridian Associates
In order to become effective in leadership roles, managers and executives of global companies must learn to balance a variety of factors. These include company-wide priorities and local customer needs, long-term growth and short-term profits, professional growth and personal and family life.
This session will give insights on balancing these issues and strategies for working effectively with people of any other culture, both at the interpersonal level and at the level of organisational systems. Some of the topics that will be covered include:
- Definition of the "Global Citizen"
- Core Values & Characteristics
- Best & Worst Practices in Global Leadership
- Personal & Organisational Analysis
- Top Five List: Profiles of Current Global Leaders and Key Success Factors
- Process Skills for Working across Cultural Boundaries
- National Dimensions of Culture
- Managing for Balance: Global/Local, Long-Term/Short-Term, Professional/Personal
- Business Impacts of Social, Environmental, and Ethical Issues
- Future Scenario Planning; Personal Action List
Keynote: The Business Case for Globalisation
Kevin Cavanaugh, VP, International Product Development, Lotus Development Corporation
Increasingly, competitive advantage must be acquired and maintained in a global context, and the systems to build that advantage must be multi-lingual. Laurence Prusak of IBM's Consulting Group comments on this global context when he says:
Globalization has occurred, not in terms of economics, but in terms of the diffusion of knowledge.
Increasing global competitive advantage will be based upon the ability of an organisation to acquire and manage knowledge from around the world. Global knowledge is by definition multi-lingual knowledge.
100% of multinationals, including those based in the US, have important bases of knowledge in countries that speak languages other than English. Employees in local markets conduct business and generate knowledge in local languages. No multinational can afford to ignore that information store or non-English knowledge from competitors, governments, or academia. In today's business climate knowledge management must be multilingual in order to meet business objectives. The lingua-franca of the Internet may be English, but when your sales team is trying to close business in Paris it's to your advantage to speak French. If it could support local business units in their native languages a company would have a decided tactical advantage in a fiercely competitive market. If the company is able to provide true multilingual support over its extranet before its competitors do, the tactical advantage in each country will be enormous.
IT systems need to be global to support the immediate needs of business in a global and electronically connected world. The economic return from global IT are real and measurable.
Global Teamwork
Willie Jow, VP, Global Products and Asia Development Centre, Sybase, Inc.
One of the most important factors to ensure a successful global operation is the teamwork amongst distributed team members and between participating organisations. In this session, we will explore the interworking parameters of communication, organisation, knowledge management, priorities, and planning. The presentation will cover various case studies with issues and solutions discovered in Mr. Jow's tenure in the globalisation industry.
For the breakout discussion time, we will explore these issues in greater detail, with a focus on the conference attendees specific needs. We will take a look at our common areas and what make certain situations unique. We will then make an attempt at applying the above philosophies to our particular organisations and try to identify the open doors and possible barriers along with ways to get around them.
Keynote: The Global eBusiness: Thriving in the Global Digital Economy
Larry K. Geisel, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Knowledge Universe
In a world being transformed by a shift from planned economies to market economies, the growing presence of technology is producing profound changes to everything we have taken for granted involving products, services and customer interaction. In this global digital economy, doing business electronically will be a critical success factor. How quickly you learn to do business in new ways, how well you leverage the special characteristics of electronic channels, and how well you adapt your operational processes, decision making and organisation may determine whether you thrive or die.
Technology Issues: Mind Over Matter: A Comparative Review of Machine Translation Versus the Technology-Aided Human Translation Process
|
Alexander Pressman, President, Uniscape Inc.
There is a lot of discussion on how Machine Translation will revolutionise how the world communicates. It is still too early to tell how this technology will resolve the issues of such applications as web translation and software application development with their twin requirements of high quality and change management. Therefore, we believe that machine translation will be most applicable in the situations where the communication is between individuals where price sensitivity is high and human based translation will predominate in business to customer communication where message quality is paramount. The discussion will centre on how do we use technology to automate the process of human translation in effect building a virtual translation assembly line. By using the assembly line metaphor we can evaluate the applicability of such concepts as BPR, time motion studies and statistical quality control. We will examine such components of such an assembly line as workflow, translation memory, machine translation, change management and translation tools integration. Finally we need to address the social and business impact of such an assembly line process on translators and customers.
Designing Globalisation into the Software Development Process
Toby Phipps, PeopleSoft, Inc.
Organisations today face a myriad of options when deciding how to approach the task of ensuring that their products are fully ready for the global marketplace. Virtually all software is a candidate for global engineering; from large systems targeted at enterprise level customers who plan to rollout the software across their world-wide organisation all the way to embedded systems and retail packages aimed at monolingual end-users. Unfortunately, many development processes are inherently difficult to structure in such a way that global features form an intrinsic part of the system. This session will examine some of the more successful techniques that are being used today to optimise the process of building global software, and the pitfalls that lie in wait for the unsuspecting global development manager.
One luxury not afforded to many companies is the ability to design a product from day one with a global customer base in mind, due to a pre-existing customer base and legacy products. Often, features need to be added after the initial release of the software, even though engineering them into the system from the ground up would produce a more seamless product. Other times, the core development team may not be sufficiently experienced or focused on the need to not only address their local market, but also users across the world. "Out of sight, out of mind" type problems can take hold. A critical step of the process that is often relegated as an afterthought is translation. Building a product that can operate correctly virtually anywhere in the world would be futile if it is unintelligible or difficult to translate to the target user community.
These considerations raise several key decisions that need to be made upfront, and adhered to with a little tweaking throughout the process. Of these, the most important are probably:
- Target countries, languages and locales
- Multiple local products or a single global release?
- Concurrent or consecutive release of international versions?
- Mono or multi-lingual user interface
- Globalization in the core development organisation or as satellite teams
Globalisation Tools
Sunil Prakash, CEO, OneRealm, Inc.
Globalised software accounts for over 50% of all software revenues generated World-wide. Currently, software is typically globalised through tedious, expensive and time consuming processes. This presentation focuses on a "Globalised" development process and shows how tools can drastically reduce the cost and time to market for world ready software. At the same time product quality and predictability of product releases is improved.
Globalization of software involves two major steps: Internationalisation and Localisation. This presentation breaks down the development process into it's components and explains where the cost and time delays occur in creating Globalised software. Globalization tools are evaluated from the view point of their applicability to each step of the process. Specific process steps examined and the category of tools that apply to them are:
|
The current state of tools in each category is presented. While several of the tools presented are useful by themselves, the full power and benefits of the tools are unleashed when they are used in conjunction with each other along with a well thought out development process.
Asia Futures: Moving towards a New Era
Nat Yogachandra, Eastman Kodak Company
Until recently, the economies of East Asia were steaming rapidly towards becoming an economic powerhouse that would rival the West. Annual GDP growth in the five ASEAN countries averaged nearly eight percent over the last decade. No other group of countries in the world has produced more rapid economic growth and dramatic reduction in poverty that East Asia. Until the crisis, Asia attracted almost half of total capital inflows to developing countries- nearly $100 billion in 1996.
Then came the crisis. It started in Thailand in July 1997, and was followed by similar collapses and capital flight in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Korea. The turmoil has pushed the region known for its fantastic growth into the most difficult period in Asian history. After two years of financial turmoil, the situation is now beginning to improve. What are the opportunities?
The new Asia after the meltdown has significantly altered purchasing trends and provides tremendous opportunities for the American corporations. American companies can now capitalise on Asia's hot zones to capture the increasing demands for consumer products. As Asian families become smaller and the annual income of middle class families becomes larger, many business opportunities emerge for consumer packaged goods companies. How do we manage our brand in Asia? How do we target various consumer segments?
Growth of consumerism in China and other emerging markets continue to provide great business opportunities to American businessmen. Beijing's entry into the World Trade Organisation seems imminent. China will open some of it's vital industries to foreign participation in the near future. How do we manage our business in China and emerging markets?
Asia is a complex collections of different cultures and markets, each with its own distinct consumer characteristics and business cultures. Individuals, especially Westerners, in business face several challenges when they move beyond their own country and culture in search of customers and suppliers. How do you manage and deal with various cultures of Asia.? For any cross-cultural program to work, the companies, especially individual managers must recognise differences in cultural values, must understand how different value influences business practices. How do we deal with various cultures in Asia?
International Market Strategies
Tim Fallen-Bailey, Director, Global Product Management, Sybase, Inc.
Choosing the best market strategy for entering new international markets (or adapting to changing conditions in existing ones) with your particular product or service is not as easy as many guides make it sound. Not only should you consider the nuances of a target country, but also the complexity, popularity, applicability, and competition for your offering. Then you must layer regional and global considerations on top as well. Cheap computers and the Web now make it possible to enter new markets in new ways which would have been too expensive before. There is no one "right" way, but this workshop will help you find a market strategy to fit your product or service in a particular country, by analysing the factors that you should consider. Using a standard methodology, typical patterns will be discussed, with examples of real product successes and failures. Experienced folks are welcome to bring war stories, as well as to take a moment to reflect on your current competitive situation. Inexperienced folks should come prepared to talk briefly about your product and target countries, and to walk away with a new appreciation of how you can make your company succeed internationally!
Globalisation Strategy Interactive Game
Camillia Hsu, Director, Global Application Development, Asia Pacific, Oracle Corp.
Come play an executive management simulation game and formulate a global strategy with some of the best minds in the industry. You will apply your skills in international management experience, global decision-making, teamwork and strategic acumen.
During the session, you will be presented a case study of an international high-technology company with an emerging-market product that seeks to successfully penetrate Asia Pacific. The case study is based on an actual organisation headquartered in Europe.
You will be randomly divided into mock executive teams. The teams will be expected to analyse, discuss and formulate a team strategy in a short period of time. Each team will then nominate a leader/spokesperson to present a proposed strategy for the company. The session concludes with a general group discussion and debrief.
Come test your strategic abilities in the global game and be the one to formulate the winning strategy.
Keynote: Globalisation Realities
Lee Ting, VP and Managing Director of Geographic Operations, Hewlett-Packard Company
Hewlett-Packard Company's perspectives on globalization are based on selling products internationally for nearly 60 years. HP also has managed international operations for 40 years. Two realities have remained constant during this time: ongoing questions about how to be a global company, and the need for continuous learning from global experience.
Mr. Ting will discuss questions HP has addressed during the evolution of its global business. These include the following:
- How do we plan operations on a world-wide basis for high productivity?
- How do we develop a culture that facilitates our ability to globalise?
- Where are the best locations for plants and warehouses?
- How do we ship products globally that also meet customer needs in each region?
He also will review findings from HP's participation in a research program with Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu in partnership with the World Economic Forum. The research identified a framework of six capabilities that support global effectiveness of companies. Companies can use this framework to evaluate their own potential for global success.
HP has found that a truly global company must integrate organisational functions across borders and with a common strategy.