Meet the Globalization Team
Anna N Schlegel, Sr. Director, Globalization Programs and Information Strategy, NetApp
NetApp has agreement on globalization priorities, investments, and processes to take the company globally.
Yes, we do.
This is a massive company-wide effort lead by our team, with CEO and staff buy in. Getting there has been a long journey!
Centre of Excellence
The Globalization team at NetApp has all the roles you expect of a typical Center of Excellence. We have strategists, we have folks looking at metrics, we have linguists, machine translation experts, internationalization experts, vendor managers …
How did we get here?
I can tell you that we used to be a team of 1… To spearhead this initiative, in 2009, I proposed to our CEO to let me establish the first localization team for NetApp. I prepared for days to show just one slide at his forum. The slide showed where we had created positions 1 through 4 and its correlation to our revenue and English tolerance in those countries. That one slide was so impactful he gave us what we asked for. A chance to increase international revenue at an unprecedented pace.
Globalization Strategy Programs Office
The small localization team quickly evolved once we showed the power of globalization. Today, our team is called the GPSO. It stands for Globalization Strategy Programs Office.
The team has a presence in 20+ countries, and I am beyond lucky to also manage the Information Engineering team at NetApp.
Combining our globalization team with the NetApp’s Content Strategy team has been the best idea ever. It has helped us understand our global customer journey better and allowed us to work on authoring and other content related programs.
Globalization Team
Back to the globalization team … we have four main teams — Strategy, Operations, Product, and Systems — and are supported by several strategic roles, including a Chief of Staff, a Communications lead, a Futurist, and a Metrics lead.
GPSO serves all of NetApp. Anything NetApp has to say, and show in non-English is governed by it. Imagine that!
Who are NetApp?
Let me tell you a bit about our company. NetApp, Inc. is an American multinational storage and data management company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. It has ranked in the Fortune 500 since 2012. We are the leader in data insight, access, and control for hybrid cloud environments. We provide organizations with the ability to manage and share their data across on-premises, private, and public clouds.
We love data
We love data, we thrive on data, and we are fanatics about helping our customers reach their goals with their data driven projects.
NetApp also happens to be an amazing place to work at, with major global accolades as “Best Companies to Work for”.
40,000 customers in 150 countries
We have more than 40,000 customers, and they are in about 150 countries. Our job is to make sure that our customers see us as a local partner.
Our team makes sure our customers can research, buy, download, get support, return, talk, chat, renew and interact with the NetApp teams locally in their preferred language.
We are here to meet our local customers’ needs with any of our NetApp offerings. As a team, we work hard to formalize globalization from start to finish.
Ensuring that our products are fully globalized is an important priority to enhance that customer experience.
Secret sauce
The GPSO’s team strategy is based on a “secret sauce” that has served us very well for many years. We don’t just globalize, we work hard on how to be a team, how to introduce ourselves, how to present, how to practice leadership, and how to drive innovation. It is one well-oiled machine.
Core values and innovation
We have core values, agreed points around accountability, clarity, speed and candor, which also happen to be the NetApp values.
A great part of the team’s success is accredited to being well known for innovation within the company.
We see ourselves as an incubator and leader in our space.
The team runs various focused innovation programs that, through a structured and accountable process, elevate the team to an undisputed center of excellence.
As a result, some of these innovation projects have grown to be leading established programs within the company, such as “Die Autobahn” which works to streamline all content systems within the company, or the “Content Fabric” which is the content strategy for NetApp.
Company Profile
Throughout the world, leading organizations count on NetApp for software, systems and services to store, manage, protect, and retain one of their most precious assets: their data.
We enable enterprises, service providers and partners to envision, deploy, and evolve their IT environments. Customers benefit from our open collaboration with other technology leaders to create the specific solutions they need. We were incorporated in 1992 and created the world’s first networked storage appliance. Today, we offer a portfolio of products and services that satisfy a broad range of customer workloads across different data types and deployment models.
NetApp is a member of the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ 100 in addition to being a FORTUNE 500 company.
Anna is the Senior Director, Globalization Programs and Information Strategy at NetApp and a cofounder at Women in Localization.
This article first appeared in VTQ Magazine.
Read more: https://vtqglobal.com/