A GLOBAL PRESENCE is an advantage when rolling out a global e-business platform, but it's not as much of a boon as one might think. Chris Baker, a Coventry, U.K.-based senior vice president with global Internet professional services company SeraNova, regularly sees clients blunder over an elementary obstacle.

The difficulty isn't with such things as culture, tax regimes and commercial law. Local people on the ground know about these, says Baker. The problem is that Americans leading e-business initiatives are often tripped up by foreign alphabets.

What's the problem? No accented characters on the keyboard?

No -- these are already built into standard software character sets. They're not on the keyboard, but you can readily create and display them. And they require just a single byte. Instead, the problem is with non-Western languages such as Mandarin, Japanese Kanji, Russian and Hebrew. These take up two bytes rather than one.

But isn't this what the international Unicode standard that many hardware and software vendors are adopting does?

Because displaying characters is only part of the problem, there are not just more bytes to hold but also more bytes to move around and store. It may seem like a small difference, but it can have enormous implications for application software, database design, webpage layout and maintenance. And transmission times. These are already slow in many parts of the world -- the use of double-byte character sets compounds that.

We're doing software selection assignments for clients and ruling out popular applications because they can't cope with double-byte languages. Because companies have had some experience with European languages, they think that non-European languages will be similar. They're not. By and large, you can create a standard Web screen design and serve pages to it in French, German or Italian, and it makes little difference. You can't do that with double-byte languages.

So what's the solution?

It's back to basics: Undertake an analysis of just what it will take to enter a given national market, in terms of the technology and software investment dollars required. And then look at the benefits. And if the benefits don't outweigh the costs, then don't enter it.

CIO

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