United nations
Collaborating with a team scattered across an office building can be difficult, so imagine what it’s like to work with a team spread across the globe. Fortunately technology provides a few solutions to assist international teams.
One tool is web collaboration system Aconex, which enables businesses to look after complex projects by providing a platform for businesses to manage projects in real time, maintaining a full record of all revisions, which means you can see who did what, when.
“Any project will have a lot of documents but it becomes harder to manage when you have everybody spread around the world. You simply can’t manage it using email. Hard copy is out of the question. You need a system that follows that 24/7 mentality, that gives people immediate access to that information,” says Aconex managing director Leigh Jasper. “We’re not saying this replaces face-to-face communication but it does enable the relationship to go a lot smoother because you have a record of that relationship.”
Another piece of technology that allows international collaboration is QSR International’s software, NVivo. Up to its eighth version, NVivo is designed to aid organisations analyse qualitative data in the field of social science. Originally for academia, NVivo has since found other users.
“Now it’s across a broad range of disciplines: management, health, journalism, urban planning,” says QSR chief executive John Owen. “More than 80 percent of data is unstructured, according to the Gartner Group, so there’s an increasing need to manage that type of information. We’re seeing more government and commercial organisations use it.”
Language was also an important consideration for the software. Not only does QSR sell most of its product overseas, localisation enables global researchers to analyse data together. “It works if you have teams in different countries and then the results are consolidated in one project,” says Owen. “It’s a massive barrier for researchers to get to grips with a tool if they have to first of all learn another language. We’ve seen that’s made a dramatic difference, that we’re able to offer a product in their own language.”
And if your business conducts research overseas, such as for marketing purposes, the software can help you manage that. “The source information would be in the language it was originally collected in, but if you had a team of researchers around the world and you were collecting information in different languages you can effectively swap from one language to another,” explains Owen. “For example, you could start using it in Spanish but then decide to use it in English, then you could change the language but the data remains the same.”
Currently available in English, Mandarin, Japanese and Spanish—with French and German coming soon—Owen says they will look to cover as much linguistic ground as possible in the future, with Russian and Portuguese on the cards. As for QSR’s experience working internationally, Owen says they’ve seen the product take off. “There’s a probably a pretty strong argument, given the current times, that there’s a need for greater research not less so we’ve seen this market grow rapidly,” he observes.
