Our Analysts' Insights

Many executives and their functional managers view international business issues as “special” and outside the parameters of the processes for which they are directly responsible. They assume that translation alone takes care of everything international. On the other hand, mid-level managers reporting to those executives often understand intuitively that global success comes from delivering a relevant digital experience that involves so much more than translation. They want to do it right, but many cannot find the guidance required to support customers in local markets efficiently within their own business unit or function. That’s why CSA Research has released its new Globalization Maturity Model (GMM), a benchmarking framework to measure – and smartly accelerate – progress in running the non-domestic parts of your business. 

The GMM enables you to assesses the ability of your organization to continuously improve its people, processes, and technologies to support sustainable global growth. The higher a firm appears on the maturity scale, the more likely it is to follow best practices and thus avoid the behaviors that degrade brand perception in local markets. 

The model has its roots in 13 years of longitudinal research into enterprise globalization and localization maturity with executives, their management teams, and international business practitioners. We identified behaviors and processes to help organizations understand where they are – and where they need to be – on the road to globalization maturity. We organized these into six levels that make up the GMM: Level 0 – Premature or Failed; Level 1 – Reactive; Level 2 – Repeatable; Level 3 – Managed; Level 4 – Optimized; and Level 5 – Transparent.

Our GMM maturity framework lays out a research-based roadmap for executives and functional managers to meet the business process globalization challenge head-on – at the strategic and operational levels – in 21 categories across five areas: governance, strategy, process, organizational structure, and automation. It enables firms to measure, as well as accelerate, their progress in running the non-domestic parts of their business.

Your organization will benefit from the model in two ways as you apply it: 1) as a research-based roadmap that specifies how to develop, sustain, and optimize your global business; and 2) as a benchmarking framework to measure – and accelerate – progress in running the non-domestic parts of your business (as well as any multicultural audiences that you target in your home market).
 

Once you begin thinking about business process globalization as a means to achieve corporate goals, you remove it from being a special case thus bringing it into mainstream enterprise planning. Then, as an integral component of your company’s strategy, it becomes just another business process to establish, measure, and improve. What you need to make that happen is a framework to regularly assess the globalization maturity of your entire organization to expose policies and procedures – along with the formal KPIs and metrics for measuring them – to analytical scrutiny. Mid-level managers need a benchmarking tool to accomplish the same at the team level. If you’re interested in more information on how to use the Globalization Maturity Model to benchmark your organization, contact rebecca@csa-research.com.