ECBMs: Commercial Missiles of Information-Age Globalization

At the height of the Cold War, people as well as political leaders in the United States and the Soviet Union worried about ICBMs: the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. From time to time, the confrontation between the two superpowers armed with these deadly weapons was eyeball-to-eyeball. To avoid such nerve-wracking state of affairs, the leaders of these nations finally decided to put in place some CBMs, or Confidence Building Measures, to defuse tensions and to minimize the accidental pushing of the bright red missile-launching button. Among the CBMs, for example, was the hotline between the White House and Kremlin.

Just as the CBMs countered political-military mistrust between ICBM-armed nations, in the Information Age there is a need for ECBMs -- Electronic Confidence Building Measures -- to counter the strangeness and suspicion of foreign commercial partners.

ECBMs include everything from multilingual websites to foreign-language proficient staff to email exchanges.

In the contemporary setting, China and India are in a race to build ECBMs. China has the long-standing advantage of 80 million overseas Chinese, often in positions of power in many of the nations China deals with. These overseas Chinese provide the "friendly local faces" in foreign lands and help build confidence. Overseas Indians play similar roles, but they are fewer in number (20 million) and not at the center of power in any significant country outside India.

With Internet and global telecommunications, however, having a "friendly local face" is no longer that important. It is much more important to have friendly "local-looking" websites, friendly and simpatico email correspondents, and friendly voices and faces at the end of audio and video linkages.

That is why Call Centers in India are sparing no expense to train their Indian employees in American, Canadian, British, or Australian accents and popular idiom. China, where things usually happen on a mega-scale, has countered by launching a program to train 100 million Chinese in English language. And businesses in the Philippines have conducted market research studies to show that American consumers at the end of a voice line are able to understand English spoken by a Filipina much better than English spoken by a Delhi girl.

Of course, this still leaves open the question of who will serve the Japanese, German or French users in their own language. The Germans, of course, have taken matters into their own hand -- in some top German firms such as Deutsche Bank, English has been mandated to be the corporate language. Germany is surprisingly turning into a nation of "pretty good English speakers".

In India, the IT industry has clearly benefited from the prevalent English language skills in India's urban centers. These skills have made access to major markets like USA and UK easy.

But Indian IT firms now need to reach out to wider markets -- in France, in Spain, in Latin America, in Japan, and even in China. The ECBMs -- the new linguistic and cultural skills -- for reaching these markets are not easily available to Indians.

In the 1950s through the 1980s, Japan created its ECBMs in the form of a thin but highly trained layer of "international managers", with consummate language and cultural skills, to act as go-between between the Japanese MNCs and their Western clients.

In the Information Age, such a strategy of "thin layer intermediation" does not work too well. Ideally, everyone in the client organization should be able to "talk to" anyone in an offshore service providing organization. If they are to continue growing their IT-enabled global services, firms in countries like India, China, and Vietnam would have to really pump up their investments and efforts in developing the appropriate ECBMs to reach diverse global markets.

Nik Dholakia