6 Keys to Managing Data in a Global World
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5. How Are My Systems Set Up to Manage Data?
One of the key decisions you make when setting up a marketing database is whether you want the database to be able to handle a language other than English. If you want to manage international data, the database you decide on must be capable of handling Unicode.
Unicode is a computing standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems. The latest version of the Universal Character set (Unicode) has over 110,000 characters covering 100 written languages and multiple symbol sets.
6. Who Will Manage Data in These Countries?
When managing different languages, it is a best practice to have people who understand the data manage the database. Your primary consideration is whether you have a local resource to help with data management. Usually if you have a marketing organization within a country, you can secure resources to help support your database there or you can use your local agency to help you with this support.
If cost is a consideration and you simply cannot afford to manage databases in France, Germany, Japan and Australia, then consider centralizing your data management activities in regional centers that speak a variety of languages from that region. For example, it is common in Europe to put data management services in the Netherlands because of the variety of European languages spoken. The same holds for Singapore in Asia Pacific.
With the US population of Spanish speaking individual increasing daily, even data sources built here need to consider languages and how to manage them within the company’s databases.
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