Synopsis: An Asian-based company with a North American subsidiary wanted to deploy new groupware technology to match the corporate offices. In the North American company, however, there were not fewer than 40 different national heritages and more than a dozen native languages among the users, and a deep fear of appearing ignorant among most senior executives.
How to deploy e-mail, groupware, and significant new productivity tools among a cadre of end-users who had strong reservations, and a wide variety of cultural impediments to adoption. If senior executives remained on the sidelines, afraid to participate for fear of appearing inept, the entire system could fail.
Many messages arriving were in a language not native to the end-users. In particular, messages from corporate headquarters which had previously arrived by fax, now came by e-mail; and, whereas the faxes could be sorted and interpreted for individual users as necessary, now messages were coming directly to people incapable of reading them.
Coping with a wide disparity of cultural styles and expectations was a major hurdle. Dealing with executives with major "hardening of the categories" and an association of the keyboard with low social status added to the complications. Fortunately, the Asian CEO of the subsidiary was an eager supporter of the new technology.
The technologists within the company were also afflicted with some of the same reticence, as their experience had been with minicomputers. We found it important to gradually introduce them into the community of peers in the world of technology, to translate their skills from the centralized to the client-server ways of thinking.
The choice of Lotus Notes was dictated by the need to be compliant with the company's home offices, where there was already a world-wide plan for Notes. At the same time, senior executives were introduced to personal computers for the first time.
To solve the language problems, we developed a three-tier strategy for translation:
| All incoming mail not originally in English is automtically translated into English by an automated program; that gives the reader the opportunity to assess whether the subject of the e-mail is even relevant to their work. If they decide it's worth pursuing the mail is forwarded to a bilingual employee. |
| The bilingual employee performs a simple, on-the-fly coarse translation to English, to capture the full sense and meaning of the document. |
| For those few documents that require formal, legal translation, an outside translation service is used. |
We found the requisite technology pieces, and mapped out the way they could be combined together into a comprehensive system.
The technology deployment was carried out, as planned, with numerous potential trouble spots identified and defused early in the deployment cycle. Today, all the end-users are productive users of the technology, and deployment continues to expand.
We consulted with the CIO to help identify trouble areas and build countermeasures before they were needed. We also collaborated with our technology partner (InfoCal) to make sure their technology deployment was at a pace the end-users could accept.