It's All About Customer Focus

By Richard Ishida, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), Internationalization Group

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) - always committed to the idea of universal access - has introduced programs and initiatives designed to reduce the time and cost associated with internationalization and localization projects.

ENLASO's globalization newsletter, "The Multilingual Standard" provides globalization professionals with technological, cultural and business perspectives on successful communication in a global economy.

The education initiatives launched by the W3C are designed to educate and assist planners, designers and development communities in removing barriers to internationalization and localization. See what is in the works at the W3C to deliver the right amount of information "at the point of need".

A week or so ago, I listened to a very interesting program on the UK's BBC Radio 4 called "Too Much Stuff". It was making the point that the business environment has significantly changed now that we are in the 21st Century, due to over-capacity on the production side.

Whereas twenty years ago new technology such as a printed circuit board could give IBM a 10-12 year competitive advantage, or a monitor could be competitively manufactured for 3 years, in today's climate these cycles are sometimes down to months, and forever shortening. Competitors can produce similar products to yours very quickly. In addition, due to globalization of manufacturing capabilities, there is substantial potential for overproduction in many industries. This can be illustrated by the example of the car industry which currently has the annual capacity to produce 20 million (one-third) more cars than the world is willing to buy.

What this boils down to is a fundamental change from the postwar era when manufacturers essentially dictated to customers what they would buy. Now supply outstrips demand, and the shoe is on the other foot.

The first knee-jerk reaction to such a situation is typically to cut prices to attract customers. These days, as many industries find price-cutting eroding their profit margins to the bone, this strategy is increasingly difficult to maintain.

Update: The Customer is King

All this means that the customer really has become King. We have heard this mantra for some time, but we seem to have now reached a point where it is no longer merely a means to obtain competitive advantage, but an essential strategy for survival. It leads manufacturing companies to move into service-based offerings, and service-based companies to redouble their attempts to understand and deliver personalized value to customers - and when the customer demands it, rather than when they are ready to deliver.

The customer has not been slow to warm to the changing realities of the marketplace. Sir Nick Scheele, President and COO of Ford Worldwide, explains how people no longer want to have what their neighbor has; they want to have what "they" want, and they have the expectation that the dealer or company will provide that. Mass production has to make way for unit-of-one manufacture. Manufacturers have to attempt not only to sell the product but to wrap it in value-added services that will win over the customer. Rather than relying on tangible differentiators, with their ever-shrinking life-cycles, companies are increasingly relying on the longer brand life-cycles and the appeal of non-tangibles such as lifestyle and emotion. Fundamentally, it's all about customer focus.

Global Product Developers Find Help At The Point of Need

All this should sound like good news to those of us in the internationalization and localization arena. What is our work about if not providing people around the world with products and services that meet their local needs? Unfortunately, we still have to fight against the perceived and often real costs of internationalization and localization, both monetary and time related. Much of the time and cost involved is down to a lack of awareness, education and assistance in the planning, design and development communities. This lack further compounds the situation by building into the product real barriers to internationalization and localization that have to be removed or re-engineered to launch the multinational product. All this is further stressing a company that is already frantically trying to remain competitive. It seems like a vicious circle.

One of the more significant needs to break this circle is not improvement of the skills or efficiency of localizers, but education of the people developing the products themselves - be they planners, designers, implementers, testers or management. The World Wide Web Consortium, always committed to the idea of universal access, has recently introduced some changes that may help here.

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Introduces Education Initiatives

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee the inventor of the World Wide Web. The Consortium develops basic standards to support the Web such as (X)HTML, CSS, XML and many others. It is also working on exciting new technologies such as SVG, XForms and SOAP. Many people participate in the development of these standards. They fall roughly into three categories. The public can get involved in open discussion lists and send comments on frequently published Working Drafts. The Member Organizations (companies, universities, research institutions) participate in Working Groups, influence the overall direction of the Consortium, and provide financial support. The Team consists of about 70 people employed by the Consortium via the Host organizations (MIT, ERCIM and Keio University), and provides technical coordination and organizational support.

The W3C has always placed value on enabling people of all languages and cultures to use the Web. To ensure that such universal access remained a reality, the W3C's Internationalization Activity was established in late 1995. In 1998, this was augmented with an Internationalization Working Group (I18N WG), that strengthened the focus on ensuring that all W3C specifications are enabled for worldwide use. November 2002 saw a significant change to the Internationalization Working Group as it rechartered and evolved to include three newly constituted "task forces."

The Core Task Force carries on the earlier work of the Working Group, reviewing the specifications of other W3C working groups and progressing two documents of its own along the standard track. The first of these is the Character Model for the World Wide Web, which describes the internationalization architecture of the W3C. The second specifies International Resource Identifiers (IRIs).

The Web Services Task Force is looking at issues and requirements for Web Services Internationalization. It has recently published a first Working Draft of Web Services Internationalization Usage Scenarios. By exchanging data between machines (instead of serving documents to users), Web Services touch different issues of the internationalization and localization problem space.

The third task force is the GEO Task Force. GEO stands for 'Guidelines, Education & Outreach'. The GEO group aims to make the internationalization aspects of W3C technology better understood and more widely and consistently used. Membership of this task force is open to experts from both W3C Members and the public.

It is still early days for GEO, but its first deliverable is focused on helping content authors develop well-internationalized (X)HTML sites with CSS. It draws on the experience of the well established Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI - pronounced "way") at the W3C. WAI has a hugely successful track record in developing guidelines, education and outreach to promote a high degree of Web usability for people with disabilities.

GEO (Guidelines, Education & Outreach) Aims for Usable Guidelines

Customer focus also plays a significant part here. The GEO group's customers are the content authors, Web masters and other people associated with the web information rollout. The group is expending a lot of effort to deliver information that takes into account usability requirements for its intended audience. The Web itself provides a great medium for enabling this.

The group starts from the assumption that most content developers are typically trying to ensure they have met internationalization requirements while already under pressure to deliver. This is especially true for the developer working within the constraints of the quicksilver product life-cycles of Internet time. The group also assumes that few people remember everything they have to do after reading a book or attending a course on a topic like I18N.

So the aim is to respond to the developer who says "I'm in the middle of implementing an X right now, just tell me what I should do at this point". At that moment they don't care too much about the theory, and they don't want to hear "go read this book", or even "go search through this set of pages." In fact the faster they can get to the information appropriate to the specific task they are performing, the better.

To help here, GEO is looking to define an architecture for this information that allows the user to quickly identify the task they are trying to perform, and then present them with an appropriate amount of information, depending on their level of expertise or interest, that is highly directive in nature. The trick is to help the user find the right amount of information at the point of need.

CONCLUSION

So GEO's mission is targeted directly at the need to provide education and support to designers and developers of Web-based content that will reduce barriers to internationalization and localization. The end goal is to facilitate the introduction of Web-based services, technology and information to a wider range of cultural and linguistic groups. In the context of an industry beset by 'too much stuff', this means assisting them to better and more easily meet the needs and requirements of increasingly expectant and individual customers.

If you are interested in getting involved with any of the work of the Internationalization Activity, visit the Activity's home page at http://www.w3.org/International/

If you are interested in contacting Richard Ishida with questions or feedback, he can be contacted at: ishida@w3c.org

Richard Ishida, W3C Internationalization Working Group Chair

Richard Ishida is a leading internationalization expert, who chairs the W3C Internationalization Working Group and is a co-chair of the Internationalization & Unicode Conference. For many years his seminars and consulting have helped product groups around the world develop websites, documents, software, and on-screen information so that it can be easily localized for the international marketplace. He is a popular speaker on internationalization related themes, and has delivered highly popular tutorials twice-yearly at every International Unicode Conference since 1995. Richard also provides consultancy to the ENLASO Language Technology Center. His background includes translation and interpretation, computational linguistics, and translation tools. He has studied French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Japanese and Arabic.