IBM’s Globalization team transforms to a centralized, continuous globalization process that leads to cost-efficiency and faster time to market

Enabling the ‘I’ in IBM. As the name implies, International Business Machines (IBM) is an international company, operating in 175 countries around the world. With such a broad reach and today’s expectations by customers that the products they use support their language and cultural conventions, the IBM Globalization team had a challenge to ensure that all our global teams can efficiently deliver high quality products for IBM customers, at the speed of today’s business.

The IBM Globalization team works with hundreds of product development teams across 15 business units to translate and test products, documentation, and marketing material.

In the past, this team operated in silos across 17 translation services centers. Each of those centers engaged their own vendors for translations and they each made their own optimizations to the process. The result was that IBM was working with 100+ vendors worldwide and did not have a centralized process. The workflows used 20+ on-premises tools, and not all of them were talking to one another.

The result was that the product development teams would often make products available in English first and then wait 1-3 months for the globalization processes to complete to make their products available in key markets such as Japan, Germany, France, Latin America, and China. With over 60% of IBM revenue coming from outside the US, this delay in product availability had a direct impact on the bottom line.

Starting in mid-2020, the team embarked on a large business transformation to radically simplify, modernize, and digitize globalization operations. The team used the IBM Garage Methodology approach and created six agile squads for execution. The squads focused on:

• centralizing 17 translation services centers worldwide
• reducing vendors from over 100 to one strategic partner
• leveraging Robotic Process Automation and Machine Translation in the workflows

They developed a cloud-based globalization pipeline that could be integrated with existing product development, documentation, and marketing content workflows, supporting over a hundred different file formats and 80 language pairs.

This means that product development teams can now directly integrate the globalization pipeline into their DevOps processes. Now, product strings and user interface are automatically extracted from the source code, automatically machine translated into multiple languages and then integrated back into the product build. In parallel, the strings and user interface aspects are sent to the vendor to review and edit the translations across all the required languages. For the first time ever, this enables continuous translation to be a part of the product development process, so that they can have their product available in multiple languages right from the first build.

Based on this business transformation, we are seeing significant business impact:

• 1-3 month faster time to market in local languages
• 11,000 hours of manual tasks automated
• $7M annual savings

We are excited with these results and poised for growth as we deliver global ready products to IBM’s worldwide clients faster than ever before!

Digital Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards 2021