Over the past 12 months, I’ve taken a number of client inquiries on globalization and multilingual strategies. But in all cases, it turned out that the challenge wasn’t really providing multilingual support. Instead, organizations are struggling to meet demand among customers, suppliers, partners, regulators and others for direct access to core enterprise systems from multiple regions, often through mobile devices or pervasive web applications. So the real question is: How are user engagement strategies affecting our ability to achieve a single, global business and technology platform that supports the increasingly pervasive use of mobile technologies?

This is now a top-of-mind consideration for many companies, especially as emerging markets are an increasingly important part of their global business strategies. The challenge is how best to tailor and adapt their products and services to capitalize on these emerging market opportunities without losing the benefits of economies of scale and the requirements for global transparency and compliance. And it’s not just about global IT service delivery; it’s about how technology can now serve the unique needs of both internal and external users, particularly where major differences may exist across language, culture, law, infrastructure, geography, value systems, and the economy.

With Jeff Wray

With almost 80% of homes in the EU-7 (France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and UK) having online access in 2013, Internet connections are a standard household component today in Western Europe. And as users demand faster connections to consume rich media content across multiple devices, broadband connectivity is quickly becoming the norm. The Forrester Research Online Access Forecast — Broadband, 2012 To 2017 (EU-7) shows that 72% of all EU-7 households had a DSL, cable, or fiber broadband subscription in 2012, well above the global average. But not all European countries show the same level of adoption. Within this group of seven, we can split the countries into three distinct groups of relative broadband development and adoption:

• Advanced adopters. The Netherlands and Sweden lead the pack in terms of both broadband penetration and the share of broadband users opting for high-speed connections. Early and robust deployment of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networks and strong cable offerings will encourage most consumers to shift away from slower connections, giving cable and fiber more than a 60% share of the home broadband market by 2017. Sweden in particular has one of the world’s strongest high-speed Internet markets today, with more than a quarter of all households enjoying a fiber connection.

…not that simple and therefore not always Amazon Web Services.

First off, we didn’t take what might be construed as the typical approach, which would be to look either at infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings. We combined the two, as the line between these categories is blurring. And historical category leaders have added either infrastructure or platform services that place them where they now straddle these lines.

Further, many people have assumed that all developers will be best served by PaaS products and ill served by IaaS products. Our research has shown for some time that that isn't so: 

1. Many developers get value from IaaS because it is so flexible, while PaaS products are generally too constraining.
2. The -aaS labels overlook the actual capabilities of the services available to developers. All PaaS products are not the same; all IaaS are not the same.
3. Not all developers are the same. Devs will use the services (PLURAL) with the best fit to their skills, needs, and goals.

Firms crave differentiation. But the truth is that even companies with dedicated time and budget for customer experience innovation focus most of their efforts on two things — whatever their competitors are doing and whatever the latest technology enables them to do. When companies blindly add shiny new features or trendy technologies to their mix of customer experiences, they’re innovating just for innovation’s sake.

To shed scattershot innovation efforts that produce little business value, customer experience professionals must examine their business challenges and associated opportunities in a different way — from the outside in. This first and vital step in the innovation process requires immersion in customers’ lives. The end goal? Developing empathy for your customers so that you can discover their unmet needs.

Someone who really understands this is Doug Dietz of General Electric Healthcare (GE Healthcare). Doug had been designing CT and MRI scanners at GE Healthcare for 20 years. As a product designer, he concentrated mostly on the aesthetics and the ergonomics of these machines, or what he calls “the shiny objects.” He was incredibly proud of these shiny objects. And he had good reason — on hospital visits, technicians would shower him with compliments.

But Doug’s machines didn’t so well work for one key customer segment: little kids.  

On one particular visit to a children’s hospital, Doug watched a little girl walk in, holding her parents’ hands. She took one look at the MRI machine, which Doug had been so proud of just moments before, and she started to cry. Doug learned that a huge percentage of children get so panicked about their procedures that they actually require sedation. He says, “I thought to myself . . . I’m kind of a failure.”