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Lost in Translation: Japan's
Industries Consider the Integration of Enterprise Content |
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30 May 2005 |
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At a recent conference in Tokyo, Japan executives from
leading industries convened to hear about the latest and
greatest technologies and techniques for integrating
content within their enterprises. Some of these
capabilities are fairly new to Japanese industrial markets,
which have not advanced as far as U.S. industrial markets
in integrating internal and external content sources into
useful portals and applications for solving business
problems. As Japan and other nations consider how to
compete with countries that benefit from both globally
accepted languages and advanced content integration
capabilities it will be important for them to consider how
to leverage assets beyond their traditional I.T. strengths
to create strong content-centric cultures in their
organizations. |
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I had the
honor of speaking at a conference in Tokyo, Japan last week
sponsored by
Uchida Spectrum, Inc., a joint venture of U.S.-based
Software Spectrum, Inc. and Japan-based Uchida Yoko. The
conference drew a sizeable crowd of representatives from
Japanese industries for the three-track program. The
presentation that I delivered focused on best practices
found in U.S. industries for integrating internal and external
content sources in enterprise portals using leading
technologies and the skills of enterprise content specialists
for managing content purchasing and knowledge management initiatives. Although
global services companies use these techniques effectively in
many Japanese operations, in industrial Japan external content
apparently remains largely unintegrated with internal content
sources. Internal content is organized
largely around standalone systems such as Lotus Notes and file
sharing servers.
Sophisticated intranet portals using web technologies and
search engines are still relatively rare in industrial Japan,
as is integrating external content with internal content
sources in sophisticated workflow applications.
This contrasts with the U.S. industrial
companies surveyed in the research that we presented at the
conference, in which 95 percent of the respondents had an
intranet portal accessible to the entire corporation
sophisticated search engines and 37 percent have a search
engine that searches all content available in an enterprise. In
these same companies content navigation tools that help to
integrate internal and external content are increasingly
common. Why this apparent gap in integrating internal and
external content? Certainly highly popular consumer Web and
mobile content products in Japanese markets are found
everywhere in Tokyo: Japan is no stranger to online content and
advanced content technologies. But in Japan the development of
internal information systems in many enterprises is still very
much in the hands of I.T. departments. The clear
movement in the U.S. towards integrating internal and external
content using advanced search and portal technologies with
guidance from business units and content specialists has no
strong parallel in Japanese industrial markets today.
It's a reminder that the culture of
content that's transforming some organizations may not be
translating on a global scale as easily as some vendors may
have hoped. The reasons for these differences oftentimes have
little to do with either publishing or technology. Here are a
few items that contribute to the differences between national
cultures in adapting integration of internal and external
content sources:
- Transformation through regulation. The impact of
corporate compliance regulations in the U.S. that require
retention of all corporate records, emails and documents has
accelerated the integration of content sources throughout
enterprises that must respond to these regulations. Being
able to access and publish all enterprise content easily on
intranets via up-to-date web infrastructure, regardless of
its sources or format, is a valuable by-product of the
enormous investments in infrastructure required for
compliance that is setting the stage for more sophisticated
content integration.
- Transformation through reapplied skills. While
many corporate librarians were lost to "downsizings" in
recent years as their collections became more virtual, the
relative abundance of these content specialists has created
great opportunities for those who are most attuned to the
needs of corporations for content integration. Yesterday's
corporate librarian in the U.S. is today's knowledge
management expert, reapplying skills used to organize library
content for easy enterprise-wide access across all content
sources to increase the value of content to their
organizations.
- Transformation through user-centric navigation tools.
Search engines and content navigation tools such as
taxonomies and faceted navigation offer a wide variety of
ways to access content through today's most advanced
enterprise portals, allowing federated access to the widest
range of internal and external content sources possible with
coherent indexing and navigation. Investments by the U.S.
government to support its anti-terror efforts helped to
accelerate the maturation of many of enterprise search and
navigation technologies over the past few years, creating a
"war benefit" for corporate markets that comes to full
fruition in the hands of knowledgeable content specialists.
- Transformation through limited language barriers.
Enterprise search and navigation tools and Web search engines
such as Google, MSN and Yahoo! used in corporate settings
leverage the semantics in English language content most
effectively at this point in time, giving a boost to content
organization in English-centric markets. While many of these
barriers are dropping as more intensive examination of other
global languages are required by both governments and
corporations, the leading edge of search and content
visualization technologies still tends to focus on
English-based capabilities as the easiest doorway to the
largest content markets.
Fueled in large part by rapidly growing Chinese content
markets, content search and navigation tools reflecting Asian
semantics and concepts of content organization are going to
come into their own over the next few years. Already
Korea is leading the way in many areas with its
government-backed content development initiatives. But there
still remains the question of what will compel Japanese markets
and other markets with less global languages to provide
stronger tools to support the integration of both domestic and
international content in their core industries.
The American experience would seem to imply that effective
content integration is not always something that happens on its
own: outside influences may be responsible for these
transformations as much as anything intentional coming from
corporations themselves. Some of these influences are from
governmental initiatives but many stem from corporate users who
are "spoiled" by the capabilities of public Web search engines
and who benefit from corporate infrastructure that similarly
"spoils" employees used to being able to solve business
problems quickly and effectively from one integrated source of
content. In the oftentimes Spartan world of industry these
capabilities may be overlooked as luxuries all too easily. But
for industries that have adapted advanced content integration
tools, developing intellectual capital as effectively as
other forms of capital infrastructure can provide clear
competitive benefits. It's important for industries in Japan
and in other nations to move beyond pure I.T. solutions and
towards involving business units, content
specialists and external suppliers who can help to develop
internal and external content assets into useful portals and
applications that solve business problems. Hopefully that's a
concept that translates well into any language.
-
John Blossom
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