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By Bill McCarthy

In the bar on Friday, I joined a company of friends (old and new) — there was a sprinkling of consultants from a couple of different firms, a Venture Capitalist, a freelancer, a couple of friends building a startup company, and the European brand manager for a well-known apparel manufacturer. Inevitably, talk turned to the New Economy. My (new) friend, the brand manager, made a bold statement: 'technology' is at least 2 years ahead of 'business'. She's right. The WWW has been thumbing its global nose at 'business' for years...the technology is global, so why are we only now paying attention?

Seems like everywhere I turn there are people fretting about how to address the business process and cultural challenges of 'going global'. One simple proof that it's not just me that's feeling this new interest in the topic: my friend and colleague Elisa del Galdo wrote a book a few years ago: International User Interfaces. It was the seminal reference on internationalisation for a while, then interest lagged. Now sales have surged — she just got her most recent royalty cheque and wayhay…party time.

The renewed interest from business leaders is easy to explain: the recent scepticism (realism?) applied by the markets to B2C web players, coupled with that segment's enormous growth targets, have forced them to seek new geographies for A) Customers, and B) Hype. B2B networked businesses — which we understand to be the real reason for confidence in the New Economy, are - by nature - more efficient the larger they are. If they're not global (or planning to be) there's something wrong (usually).

Still not convinced? …the more fact-oriented of you might like to see some analyst figures…

IDC: by 2003 more than 60% of Web users will reside outside of the U.S. Gartner Group: b2c transactions outside of US will rise to 61% by 2003, b2b will rise to 63% by 2004.

So…what are the challenges?

Business partnership must be made to cover fulfilment, logistics, financial clearance/payments systems, legal and tax issues etc. Pre and post-sales service must be local or at least designed locally. A couple of years ago, Bank of Scotland shook up the Irish mortgage market very successfully, from a call center in Scotland. However, the business was designed in Ireland, with a thorough investigation of the local issues. They then went on to open the Netherlands market - this time online (www.eubos.nl). Again, huge success, again firmly founded in local partnerships and implementation.

Content is still King. Yahoo! is genius at providing regionally relevant content…they have over 300 local content partnerships. Nothing new, or specific to the web, of course… MTV's European success only started when they addressed local needs, by adding local programming feeds and advertising windows. McDonalds give you mayonnaise with your fries in the Netherlands and Curry Potato Pie in Hong Kong.

Once you've worked through all the business stuff (and there's plenty more than I've touched on here…brand and marketing for a (big) start), you're ready to start designing the systems. At it's most simple, think of globalised system design as having 2 layers: 'internationalisation': coping with things that have to be done, or supported (eg character sets) and 'localisation': local issues supported by the internationalised layer (eg use of color).

Some more fundamental internationalisation challenges are addressed by technology: plenty of packages address language, dynamic page build, personalisation, content management…. Hosting must be regional, and mirrored, to ensure respectable download times.

I was given a simple demonstration of culturally distinct design recently when I met another new friend (don't I have a great job) — Stefan Peterson, Marketing Manager of bokus.com (largest online bookseller in Scandinavia). He points out the clarity and lack of clutter in the design. Even his Danish and Finnish customers tell him that the site looks 'so Swedish'. Go there. Compare it with Barnes & Noble or Amazon. The American designs fill the page with every option they can fit in there. It's not a case of 'right or wrong'; it's simply culture in design.

There's a surprise around every corner: Douwe Mik, Managing Director of Logigo.com (an emarket startup in logistics) had his new company's name checked for worldwide cultural acceptance. The report concluded: "We have looked at this from the Chinese, Malay…(snip)… and as a long shot we think that perhaps the pronunciation of the words could be close to a local expression "Lau-chee-ko" which roughly translated in a Chinese dialect used locally means 'dirty old man.'"

The lesson? …get local, expert assistance.

Bill McCarthy is the European VP for user experience at Cambridge Technology Partners (www.ctp.com). He can be reached by e-mail at bmccar@ctp.com.

This article was originally published in InformationWeek (6/5/00).

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