Accelerate speed to market - and increase turnover up to 6% - by leveraging the Single Source of Truth in your localization projects
In the heart of Paris, on the Rue Vaugirard, there’s a small shelf of marble embedded in the wall. Ignored by most passers-by, it’s the last surviving “mètre étalon” of sixteen that were placed around Paris in the 18th Century. It is the single source of truth for the length of a Metre, defined by the Académie des Sciences in 1791.
Prior to this, all sorts of approximate calculations for a metre were used, resulting in misunderstandings and bad outcomes. By placing the mètre étalons in public places, the newly-installed Government sought to end all disputes, about the Metre at least.
From the Prime Meridian in Greenwich to the emergence of Longitude and Latitude in navigation, the single source of truth (SSoT) is strategically important to business and the wider economy.
In fact,the adoption of an SSoT is a short cut to efficient and agile decision-making. In today’s multifaceted, multi-location, multi-stakeholder environment, it is essential. Business consultant Lionel Grealou defines it as:
Single Source of Truth (SSoT) is the practice of structuring information models and associated schemata, such that every data element is stored exactly once. From a business perspective, at an organisational level, it means that data is only created at source, in the relevant master system, following a specific process or set of processes. SSoT enables greater data transparency, relevant storage system, traceability, clear ownership, cost effective re-use, etc.
The adoption of an SSoT simply makes a business more agile and responsive. Writing in Forbes, Brent Dykes said,
Unlike in some political circles where alternative facts appear to be acceptable, you can’t afford to have them in your organization. They must be eradicated at all costs if you want to run your business effectively and efficiently. Having multiple versions of the truth can lead to confusion, paralysis and bad decision making.
Software localization, known as l10n, reflects the complexity of the business environment and drives both productivity and time to market improvements that directly impact the bottom line.
Kurt Schuler at semiconductor consultancy Arteris discusses what he learned at MIT about the consequence of delays in time to market:
They hammered home the value of time, and how the financial cost of “lost time” was mathematically orders of magnitude greater than the other costs that managers find easy to measure, like engineering salaries, tool licenses and sales commissions.
Schuler brings home the cost impact here:
For example, if you are one quarter (3 months) late to market with a chip that has a 2 year product life on the market, you have already lost over one-third of the revenue you would have received for the chip had it been on time.
Such delays have an impact across the product development cycle, including technical manuals and other publications that must be written concurrently and then intelligently translated into multiple languages to match the launch timelines. Improving that workflow by having product managers collaborate, manage and review translations in an agile way is the key to website localization productivity.
So how does the concept of having a Single Source of Truth impact localization? American bicycle brand Specialized faced this problem. They were rapidly expanding sales and marketing offices globally, and needed to feed their content to these markets. Trying to translate using text documents, spreadsheets and outsourced translation firms was not only inefficient, it was slow, weakening the brand and delivering inconsistent messaging.
This lack of a SSoT was overwhelming the need for an agile marketing stance. With Lokalise, their many localization tools - everything short of Post-It notes on computer screens - were reduced to a single one. Specialized summarizes power of SSoT in their localization efforts as:
Specialized internal resources can be used with domain knowledge
to translateLokalise allows the use of machine translations or external translators in a pinch
Translators and developers can access the content easily
APIs and webhooks give developers the ability to automate the localization workflow
Bad website localization costs time, can delay ever-shorter market cycles and risk brand equity. The process does not need to be so disruptive, once the concept of having a single source of truth has been adopted. As the experience of Specialized and many others shows, the alternative to SSoT in website localization is a disjointed process that lacks transparency and becomes one of the bottlenecks to success in the marketplace.