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Localization World Montréal

posted 2006-10-31 19:03:26
by Bill Rabkin

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the Localization World conference in Montréal.  It was a great opportunity to renew old acquaintances and make new ones, and to introduce Idiom Technologies and our WorldServer solution to many LSPs, technology solution providers, and users of translation services.  In fact, traffic at the Idiom booth was almost continuous from eight o’clock in the morning until closing time on both days of the conference, and I was unable to attend as many presentation sessions as I had hoped.

One session that I did attend was entitled Math Matters: Building Global Awareness in the Corner Office, presented by Karen Fowlie, director of product services at Cognos.  Ms. Fowlie described how she had transformed this international software company from one in which localization of products occurred somewhat haphazardly, with little understanding of software globalization best practices, to a well-educated organization that recognizes the impact upon development schedules and global market opportunities of a disciplined approach to product globalization.  Early in her eleven-year tenure at Cognos, she set out to develop a three-year plan for global product delivery, assessing the then-current costs of translation services and relating them to expected return on investment in each country or market where Cognos has a presence.  Working with engineering management, product management, and in-country sales and marketing colleagues around the world, her team developed and refined a financial model that helped senior Cognos executives allocate globalization resources most effectively. The team focused on activities that bore the highest external costs, were repeated for each target language (candidate for automation?), or were completely manual (another automation candidate). Through the team's efforts, development executives recognized the benefits of adopting globalization best practices throughout the company, which led to a consistent, predictable, repeatable approach to simultaneous delivery (“simship”) of Cognos products in all target languages.

Today Cognos, a world leader in business intelligence (BI) and performance planning software for the enterprise, utilizes its own tools to analyze and report on data that it gathers about its globalization efforts.  Of course, if Cognos were using WorldServer they would find that all current and historical translation-related project data is automatically captured and maintained by WorldServer in archive tables in the system’s SQL database, without direct user action.  Analyzing and reporting on this data with Cognos BI tools would deliver timely information to Cognos managers and executives.

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