Mitigating IT Challenges in Emerging Markets

Hello again, Inner Circle readers. I know that many of you, like Sun, are facing changes in your business models as the global business environment shifts.

Many of you saw our September feature article with Sun EVP of Global Sales and Services, Peter Ryan, where he discussed the massive increase in people, applications, businesses, and services in emerging economies. As Peter stated, in order to support these fast-growing markets, companies must build out their organizational infrastructure and adjust their approach to workforce management. He noted some of the organizational challenges these opportunities present.

I'd like to address some of the unique challenges that an IT organization faces when we try to provide services in a robust, secure manner to parts of the world we haven't worked with before. Based on Sun's own experience providing support to over 50,000 employees and partners in 170 countries, I believe there are five major concerns IT groups confront when building out services internationally, particularly in emerging markets. These include infrastructure, security, culture, language, and support for specific IT services.

Infrastructure
In places like Africa, China, India, Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, the infrastructure is not likely to be as developed as we see in the U.S. and parts of Europe. So, from the inception, the IT organization has to work around those infrastructure challenges. In the U.S., we assume people have high bandwidth or broadband network connectivity to our services and servers. But this may not always be the case in parts of Africa or Latin America. So you have to think about designing solutions — whether they are applications or other services — to be available in a disconnected mode. Instead of relying on a permanent connection back to the server, perhaps users can download information to process on a laptop or smart phone and then upload that information back to the server. Or maybe you need alternate paths for people to access your services. Rather than relying on a permanent network connection, you need to provide backup capabilities with processes and procedures in case the main circuit fails. Or, you might offer a wireless connection so that services can be offered via broadband if it's available — or some other form of dial-up or wireless connection.

It's important to look at your service from the perspective of people in that region. It's helpful to consult either with local business representatives or consultants to understand the most common challenges. One of the most frustrating things for us in IT is not being able to rely on the infrastructure — whether it is telephone service, broadband, wireless, or even fax services. But in many of these countries, these are common, day-to-day challenges, and you need to be prepared to remediate them.

Security
Many developing countries don't have the same standards for network security that exist in other parts of the world. Or similarly, they don't give the same priority to security requirements that we impose upon network users in the U.S. Our over 20 security experts, based in far flung locations like San Francisco, Singapore, and Sweden, are often challenged with trying to enforce security standards in regions of the world that view these standards as bureaucratic nuisances that get in the way of progress or time-to-market. Oftentimes, you have to educate folks about why security requirements are necessary and what benefit they bring to the company. You may also need to spend time in these countries working with local business leaders to secure their support and to educate end users on the most critical security issues.

Culture
Culturally, there are different sets of expectations people have about IT services and network connectivity. We often work with local businesses to explain typical protocols and best practices for using IT services. In some parts of the world where bandwidth is very expensive and somewhat limited, we've had to educate people on the best way to use that bandwidth without obstructing business — for example, not using those services for personal or non-business reasons during the workday. We've seen many instances where personal use of the network impedes business operations, but in most cases (and with a little education), end users understand the negative impact their actions have and quickly change their behavior.

Language
Language has always been a challenge for global business. Sun has a global call center in India, and we provide services in a number of different languages, even though we focus on English as the spoken language of the company. But as we move into places like South Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe, we understand that English is not always the first language for many employees. So how do you deal with that cost-effectively?

To augment typical call center services, we offer a full suite of online and self-help resources as well as a chat feature that allows users to reach technical support staff without being tied to a phone. We've found this works better for people who are intimidated when speaking English on the telephone about a technical issue. In some cases — typically for the most critical documents — we provide localized language versions of technical support documentation. Finally, in other cases where language remains an inhibitor, we work with local country staff to identify people with multi-language skills who we use as primary points of contact to represent technical issues back to the IT community.

Specific IT Services and Support
The final challenge is providing the right services to each of these markets. In developed markets, we offer a very standardized level of support. There are standards for service level expectations, network availability, commitments, and so on. But many times in emerging markets, there are services that are more important to a specific country than they are for the general market. For example, email service might be the most critical service for a small country in South Asia. And ERP services might be less important during most of the month. So we have to tailor our services.

The challenge for a centralized IT model is that this model always tries to optimize for the whole. As soon as you start to modify that for the local country, it becomes a challenge for many IT organizations. We handle that by meeting with local executives and business staff and, where needed, design a local business requirements document or customized service level agreement. If necessary, we augment our support model with additional staff to meet that business need. We try to keep that to a minimum to conserve costs, but we do want to understand local business needs and do our best to meet them.

In time, it's our hope that as those markets develop and mature, we can eliminate specific customer requirements and move to a more standardized model. It's a constant challenge for IT folks to keep up with the demands of local businesses that are operating at light speed and that, in many cases, are balancing the need to drive standardization and lower cost with this hyper growth mentality.

As always, I enjoy an ongoing dialogue with you, our Inner Circle readers. I encourage you to keep sending in your questions, comments, and concerns. I'm always open to suggestions for topics to discuss in this column.

Until next time,

Bob Worrall
CIO, Sun Microsystems
cio@sun.com