3.4 Collaboration and the New Global Marketplace

The Internet, intranet and extranet have one thing in common apart from the technological infrastructures: the ability to facilitate knowledge-sharing within the corporation and with external entities, what the industry calls ‘collaboration’. Corporations have acknowledged in principle that people are their biggest asset. However, most companies have a tendency to treat employees as easily replaceable commodities that can be added and subtracted from business processes at will. Recognizing that employees do possess process knowledge – or at least compartmentalized knowledge associated with components within a larger process – firms are eager to capitalize on information and draw it out of employees and into knowledge management systems to record and effectively begin to commoditize process knowledge.

What firms often overlook is that knowledge is not simply the recording of information using sophisticated technology but the ability to associate information acquired in the past and correlate it to an ever-changing set of business conditions. Collaboration technologies such as IBM’s Lotus Notes, Microsoft’s NetMeeting and Parametric Corporation’s Windchill present new avenues for interoperability between companies and external business partners to reach mutually inclusive business objectives. However, in the shadow of businesses that are starting to develop an appreciation for collaborative efforts, society in some cases is viewing the exchange of information as a cultural threat.

The cultural aspect of technology application and adoption is often overlooked by businesses interested in establishing themselves in the global marketplace. Elsewhere, I analysed the cultural aspects of brand definition regarding financial services,^[112] section 4.5 analyses brands in relation to technology. Regarding the use and application of technology itself, companies tend to develop an approach based on what they have observed during years of research in their own countries. For example; a US company wishing to establish itself in Ireland may depart from the premise that consumers in Ireland tend to share the behaviours of North American consumers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yet the underestimation of cultural aspects has been a problem for over a decade, and is still so today. Governments and society itself tend to resist foreign businesses especially when they show no respect for the nation’s values, language, religion, the ‘habits of the heart’ that make cultural diversity. If disintermediation and globalization are translating into homogenization, they are being translated wrongly. ‘Cutting out the middle man’ does not mean overlooking local knowledge; it simply means making the best of what international business has to offer. Collaboration is the way of the future, the means to eliminate the intermediary through a close relationship between international companies sharing knowledge of their consumer behaviours, product advantages and so on.

One consequence of the lack of collaboration has been the growth of an isolationist policy. For example, in 1999 the French government passed a law that if a website (geographically located server) resides inside France, the content of the website must be in French. This is not surprising when one remembers France’s Centre for European Studies’ 1995 motion with regard to the threat posed to French culture by the invasion of Anglo-Saxon Internet elements and the English language, in this case representing yet another foreign influence, that of North America.^[113] The most important thing to remember is that although the world seems to be going through a process of globalization, it has never been more fragmented. In the late 1980s and early 1990s we saw Germany reunited, but at the same time we saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, single entities now reconfigured into separate nation states. Within countries such as the United States, cultural values have become so fragmented that the term ‘culture of separation’ has come to describe American culture better than any other term.^[114] In a world where mass media apparently dictates values, fashion, religious and political stance, how to explain the diversity of electrical plugs that one needs to carry when travelling from the US to Europe? In their dream of homogeneous global values, business must not forget that globalization is not to be seen as a ‘one size fits all’ solution.

One company that is rightly evaluating local culture in order to establish a business internationally is the United Kingdom’s Tesco. In their South Korean stores, the food chain employs local people and, realizing the importance of family values in South Korea, has ‘culture centres’ for mothers and their children at all their stores. While doing their shopping, mothers can take quick classes on how to cook, how to use the Internet and even how to draw.^[115]

The issues of national sentiment and anti-globalization can also be found in the current debate on the Internet language. As we have already seen, France has reacted to the pre-eminence of English as the language in computer-based media. One could argue that the use of the English language on the Internet has come as close as anyone has ever got to the idea of a Tower of Babel, which ultimately seems to represent the intention of globalizing groups. However, as one can see from the growing research on multilingual websites, the issue is not going to be solved by simply accepting English as the new lingua franca. Governments and local companies are insisting that all websites should be translated or multilingual. The same applies to colours and iconography – certain colours, such as black and white, represent different meanings and sentiments in different countries. Certain icons and gestures are offensive in one country but extremely friendly in others.^[116] An international company wanting to establish a venture in a foreign country needs to consider all this to avoid alienating online customers. As said above, the matter of culture is often underestimated by companies seeking to establish themselves internationally. The key thing to remember is to think global, act regional and look local, thus respecting local cultural values which must not be underrated.

^[112]J. A. DiVanna, Redefining Financial Services: The New Renaissance in Value Propositions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) pp. 101–4.

^[113]See M. de Kare-Silver, e-shock. the new rules. e-strategies for retailers and manufacturers (Basingstoke: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2001 [1998]) p. 90.

^[114]See R. Bellah, R. Madisen, W. Sullivan, A. Swindler and S. Tipton, Habits of the Heart. Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) pp. 277–9.

^[115]R. Taplin, ‘Tesco racks up a Local Success’, Financial Times, April 18 (2002).

^[116]J. Perkin, ‘Multilingual Websites Widen the Way to a New Online World’, Financial Times, February 7 (2001).