Regardless of its size, vertical, or headquarters location, your organization can benefit from implementing a framework for globalizing business processes to guide your global strategy. The clarity it provides will enable teams responsible for mainstream functions and operations to align their work in home markets with the company’s international goals. 

Those in charge of multilingual content, code, services, and programs are all too familiar with watching their firms fail to generate the full revenue potential from their efforts. Why? Because roadblocks and process gaps prevent well-meaning colleagues from delivering on their own commitments to local markets. However, applying a model for business process globalization can go a long way toward building confidence among all teams enterprise-wide to successfully attract and support international customers.

What Well-Meaning Colleagues Often Get Wrong

The list of gaps and brick walls when it comes to supporting prospects, customers, and other stakeholders outside of your home market almost always touches every business function at some point. You can trace the problems and challenges to the lack of corporate guidance that ensures common goals – you need everyone rowing together in the same direction at the right speed. Common examples that CSA Research has documented recently include the following:

Our data demonstrates that there is huge room for improvement for globalization compliance in functions outside of translation and localization teams. Well below 50% of survey respondents in our ongoing localization maturity research claim that any of their colleagues in other areas have succeeded in nearly or fully globalizing their processes for customer-facing areas such as marketing, sales, or customer care.

How a  Roadmap for Business Process Globalization Can Help

Multilingual support, though critical for continued global growth, is only one small component of what it takes to be successful (see the multilingual delivery issues in the table above). CSA Research is currently developing a framework for business process globalization that organizations can use to benchmark how they’re doing overall when it comes to running the non-domestic parts of their business. 

We began this project with the capabilities identified and analyzed over 13 years of longitudinal studies of corporate behavior and practices related to going and staying global – both successfully and not so successfully. The framework will address areas beyond localized content and code; for example, decision-making models for market entry and financial accounting practices that provide cross-border data that is truly useful. If you would like to share how you might apply such a framework within your organization, please contact rebecca@csa-research.com.