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An apple a day keeps a doctor away. But is it always the case?
Imagine a day at the office. A colleague of yours, say, Helen, has brought in some apples from the grocery store. They are on the coffee table near the water cooler. Some are green, and some are red. All are shiny and glossy and look real yummy.
As you walk by, you reach out and grab an apple. It’s still 1 hour till lunch time, but you’re already starving. Your first instinct is to start eating it immediately. As your hand is moving to your mouth, suddenly a thought strikes you: did anyone wash the apples yet? You have no idea, and the lady who brought them is nowhere to be found. It surely looks clean, but should I really risk it?
Grudgingly, you head into the kitchen, turn on the water and rinse the apple thoroughly. Just in case.
As you’re heading back to your cubicle, you bump into Helen. She notices the apple in your hand and the water dripping from it. “My, you shouldn’t have bothered. I’ve already washed them in the morning”, she says.
Bummer. You’ve just wasted 10 minutes of your life doing work that has already been done. But then again, how could you know?
Exactly the same thing regularly happens in global content supply chains due to lack of transparency. Our extended content authoring, copywriting, translation & localization teams continuously wash the same “apple” over and over again. It’s very easy for people to ignore the fact that their “apple” has already been washed multiple times before, as they have little visibility into each other’s information, processes, and added value.
Here are some typical scenes of “re-washing the apple” from the daily life of internationalization & localization projects:
So, why aren’t global content professionals, especially managers, around the world concerned with lots of money and time being wasted on their global content just like that?
That’s because of the perceived risk, which in turn is caused by lack of trust. Just as you won’t eat your apple until you’re 100% sure it’s clean (in effect, high quality), they don’t want to publish their global content until they are 100% sure it’s high quality according to some explicit (or, more frequently, implicit) requirements.
But what if you always knew up front whether your apple has been washed or not? If it has been washed completely, or from one side only? If a special washing liquid has been used, or just regular tap water? If a certified expert has been washing your apple, or a simple passer-by? That’s what real supply chain transparency should enable you (as well as anyone else) to learn effortlessly.
And here’s an even more interesting question: what if you knew that eating an unwashed apple has, say, only a 0.0001% chance to negatively affect your health?
Exactly the same concept can be applied to the connection between content quality and content performance. Let’s call it sensitivity. Here’s how it works:
Knowing all that, perhaps you might not care THAT much about re-washing that apple anymore. Right? Let us know in the comments.
