Recently, I was reading an article in Global Services magazine, "The Quest for a Chief Globalization Officer." It brought up a couple of thoughts for me.
First, I am wondering if anyone else knows of any other companies that have successfully created the position of "Globalization Officer." As the article mentions, this concept was brought up in 2002 by Donald DePalma in his book, Business without Borders. It would be interesting to know and measure the results other companies have had by implementing this position.
Second, one of the sentences in the article states, "Cisco believes innovation is easier in greenfield markets as the challenge to overcome legacy applications and solutions are not there." I am assuming that they mean that Cisco, as most other companies and people, have realized this a long time ago and have applied this when developing products for those markets.
It also raises the fact that outsourcing to some of these markets can provide different ideas and technologies that can assist with product development – ideas that perhaps are not in place yet in the buyer’s country. Usually the talk from buyers (or at least the generally accepted practice) is that knowledge transfer has to take place from the buyer’s country to the offshoring country. This may even include the concept of the application, because the concept may not have hit that market yet — whether it is the idea of buying mortgages or buying tickets online, etc. However, there may be some cases where concepts can go the other way such as in the banking industry and the use of model technology to report transactions.
For example with a Ukrainian credit card, when it is used anywhere in the country or outside the country, within a minute the user receives a text message about the transaction. If they did not make the transaction, or the amount is incorrect, it can be immediately disputed.. When I use my US bank credit card outside of the country, a phone call is placed to my US home some hours later asking if I used my card to make that transaction. Of course I am not there to get that phone call. When I finally do get in touch with them about the transaction, I usually get reprimmanded for not telling them I was going out of the country. Certainly it has been talked about before that Europe in general is ahead of the US in mobile phone usage, and it may be with these types of applications US companies can receive extra benefit and ideas by working with providers outside the US.
