Editor's note: The following is a guest post from Rebecca Ray, director at CSA Research.
Delivering an integrated IT experience wherever you do business around the world – especially after the release of ChatGPT – means more than simply setting up a few servers outside your borders and offering extended help desk hours for employees.
Executives and colleagues depend on you to provide guidance for technology decisions to support multicultural, multilingual teams in disparate physical locations spread around the world. It’s normal to face questions and challenges for how to efficiently globalize your own team to support these requirements.
All teams within an organization depend on their IT colleagues to help them make sound decisions to support global expansion and international revenue. However, the IT organization can only deliver for its stakeholders if it has first globalized its own processes, including data collection, analysis, and security infrastructure.
Here are six key steps to deploy a globalized IT experience:
1. Approach globalization as you do security and accessibility.
Language and culture underpin accessibility, which IT teams are required to deliver. Tightly integrate globalization compliance into software architecture and maintenance models.
Even if you only do business in a few other countries, you may still be required to maintain local servers to ensure data security and privacy. If you’re not sure whether your systems of record are world-ready, localization colleagues have the expertise to benchmark them and can train your team accordingly.
2. Develop flexible roadmaps.
Whatever you build, buy, and deploy must accept, manipulate, and render current and future languages required to support targeted markets.
Establish international guidelines for all future development projects carried out by internal staff or third parties. This includes any rearchitecting required for database, content management, e-commerce, financial reporting, business intelligence, or customer relationship management systems.
Your roadmap may also need to account for areas with more limited IT infrastructure, less reliable internet connectivity, and reduced privacy and data protection.
3. Ensure adherence to local data security and privacy laws.
IT must lead the way to ensure that all teams enterprise-wide learn to safeguard data outside of the firm’s domestic market as it’s accessed and crisscrosses international borders.
Data privacy laws vary from one country or region to another. Rather than supporting each individually, determine the most stringent regulations and design to those.
Currently, this effort includes adherence to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, China’s Personal Information Protection Law, and California's Consumer Privacy Act.
4. Don’t get run over by AI.
Just because AI exhibits more application to real life with every passing day doesn’t guarantee that it arrives on the scene multilingual and ready to do business locally.
Whether you start with a simple chatbot pilot or a project to upgrade customer analytics, AI applications need to be designed and tested for international use cases, regardless of language, culture, or local business and regulatory practices.
The localization team can help train your team to design for language awareness and local user experiences. Be aware that many public AI engines don’t yet speak many languages or treat all languages equally.
5. Pay attention to international hosting requirements.
Your organization’s IT hosting rules – such as the use of technology based on public cloud servers – can have a major influence on the choice of systems to manage your company’s global business.
A strategy that restricts hosting to in-house data centers may limit your company’s ability to access the latest technology. Whatever the restrictions, your model should meet all business, data, technology, and industry compliance requirements to support employees and stakeholders in your local markets.
6. Identify third-party partners that may be your weakest link.
If one or more of your teams depend on external expertise or intellectual property, make sure that their deliveries – and any customer-facing services they offer – are globalization-compliant according to your criteria, not theirs.
The last thing you want is to be tripped up by a third-party piece of software that’s not ready for global primetime when absolutely every other component you deliver is ready for the world.
Scaling and integrating IT processes and systems to build and maintain proper infrastructure to support other business functions to deliver on their international commitments is a tall order. Yet going and staying global is just one more business process for IT – nothing more, nothing less.
Integrate globalization compliance into your other processes now so that you don’t have to rearchitect or play catch-up to accommodate it in the future.
