Post-Event Report: 6th Annual IQPC Content Week Conference

Stephen Ryan, Moravia Worldwide and the GALA Board

6th "Content Week 2006" sponsored by IQPC
The Venetian, Las Vegas, Nevada
30 January-1 February 2006

The End of an Era

In the "old world," says Google's Dave Girouard, information was power; both were guarded jealously and distributed carefully. In the "new world," information is enlightenment and must be shared freely. In his Content Week keynote address, Girouard shared Google's view of the changing business environment, where yesterday's "knowledge worker" is being supplanted by the 21st century “Self Directed Innovator”. Says Girouard, an organization of "knowledge workers" no longer has a competitive advantage. Today, knowledge is merely a minimum requirement, the ante to get in the game, and a new era is born: the era of the Self Directed Innovator.

According to Girouard, the Self Directed Innovator doesn’t hold formal organizational power; rather, she is a change agent within a company; she gets things done. And, she is a learner. To get things done, a Self Directed Innovator needs talent (appraised during the recruitment process), direction (not grand plans, but guiding principles supported by measurement and metrics) and, of course, access to information.

The Self Directed Innovator's information needs involve three things, says Girouard: a photographic memory, the collective wisdom of the organization, and access to the world's information. Not a literal photographic memory, of course, but "desktop search" as a proxy for photographic memory. Organizational wisdom comes not only from what can be found on the company intranet, but also in files, databases, reports, CRM systems, etc. And, the Self Directed Innovator must have access to competitive information, background material and research that resides today in everything from books to blogs.

How to Avoid the "New World"

Technology – like Google's many-faceted search technologies – can help with access to information, but Girouard suggests that it is entrenched organizational attitudes about sharing information that can be a major limitation. In a tongue-in-cheek how-NOT-to-do it summary, Girouard offers five ways to avoid the "new world":

• Restrict publishing of "important" information to a few employees – as often is the case with the classic organization's intranet

• Require publishers of information to follow strict metadata standards to classify the information – that way it will be harder for anyone else to find it

• Assume that if you build it, they will come. And if no one comes, that's not really a "failure" on your part (is it?)

• Build complex interfaces and call them "sophisticated"

• When in doubt, restrict access

As Google and "search" become an ever-more- essential part of the business climate, expect to hear more about access to information, more about desktop search, and maybe even more about Dave Girouard's Self Directed Innovator. And, of course, expect the growing importance of access to information to raise the profile and importance of multilingual information.

Dialing Up Business Value

Content Week's second keynote speaker, Intel's David Sward, talked about how Intel has developed the notion of "Business Value Dials" – specific measurements of end-user benefits to an organization in money-terms – to address the ever-increasing pressure to measure the intangible results of an investment in a hard-to-measure undertaking like spending on IT projects.

Together with the use of a standard framework and repeatable processes (and with buy-in from everyone – especially Finance), Business Value Dials allow the organization to agree on the ROI methodology up-front, and to get tangible "hard numbers" on business returns like days of inventory (DOI) reduction, factory uptime and headcount productivity, etc. from what can be hard-to-measure investment returns. In other words, a common definition, a common vocabulary and a common approach allow you to really measure the bottom-line impact of an investment.

Sward cited Intel's experience with Business Value Dials in determining that by handing out wireless-enabled notebook PCs they would see a net-present-value return of $26 million from increased productivity. This was surely a “no-brainer” decision.

Though Sward's presentation – "Measuring the Business Value of IT" – focused on valuing technology investments, I couldn’t help but ponder how Business Value Dials might help to justify spending to have that next software product release done in FIGS.

Translation and localization: "more and more of it"

In "Content Management in the Age for Globalization," panelists offered their views of new developments and progress in the realm of multilingual information. Alison Toon, Translation and Localization Manager for Hewlett-Packard Global Operations noted that she sees an increased recognition of the importance of multilingual content, and, regarding translation and localization, "more and more of it." Toon also noted that she also sees a re-emerging interest in machine translation, and noted that there is a place for machine translation with properly-managed post-editing (Toon stressed that HP doesn’t publish any machine-translated content without post-editing).

In the same panel, Intel's Brian Gorman related how user-experience testing surrounding Intel's new logo involved multiple worldwide locations and an overall greater appreciation for a user-driven marketing approach. Translation.com's Martha Geller said she sees two emerging trends: a larger effort to support multilingual end-user experiences – Geller cited the travel industry, where large hotel chains now make it possible for a user in Russia, say, to book a hotel room online, in their native language – and a return to a distributed model to manage translation and localization, one that is not fully centralized nor fully decentralized.

AC Nielsen's Bruno Herrmann spoke passionately about his organization's global content strategy for public-facing websites, client portals and the company's intranets. Herrmann related how AC Nielsen has established an impressive "Internet Team" with global reach and well-defined Web Content Manager and Content Expert roles. Integral to the team design and content development process is a robust translation and localization approach. Interestingly, Herrmann independently corroborated Martha Geller's earlier observation by noting that AC Nielsen has a distributed approach – not fully centralized, not fully decentralized – to both translation and localization and "governance" of global content.

Overall, there was visibility for our industry not only in several sessions where multilingual content issues were considered, but also on the modest exhibit floor. GALA members Translations.com and Idiom were exhibitors, as was translation company viaLanguage. I was pleased to see this level of visibility, and I look forward to hearing more talk about localization at non-industry conferences in the future.

GALAxy Note: GALA is also a media partner of IQPC's Web Site Globalization conference, which will take place May 23-24, 2006 in San Diego.

GALA Board Member Stephen Ryan is Moravia Worldwide's Marketing Director. He can be reached at stephenr@moravia-worldwide.com.