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Carlos Figueroa, manager of Disney World's global websites, keynoted IUC28. He shared several lessons with the audience, including the importance of aligning a global website strategy with corporate business goals. For Disney's resorts, that means assisting a prospective visitor throughout the "vacation planning cycle," starting with where to go to what to do when on vacation to how to look forward to the next vacation. With Disney properties in the U.S., France, and Hong Kong, and vacationers coming from around the world, that's by definition a multilingual task. Besides aligning website plans with Disney corporate strategy, Figueroa's development group also shares a common web technology platform with corporate siblings Disney, ESPN, and ABC television. Thus, content management, media engines, CRM, and other core infrastructure are developed once, then deployed across Disney divisions and globally. Figueroa said that Disney has taken a step-wise approach to its international efforts -- rather than trying to globalize everything at once. Because most of its non-U.S. guests come from Canada and the United Kingdom, the first global Disney World websites were in Canadian French, Canadian English, and U.K. English. It now offers Spanish for U.S. residents, Spanish for Argentina and Mexico, and Japanese. With Hong Kong Disney World coming online, Chinese is next. An attendee asked what Disney learned and would do differently next time. Noting the 3 pillars of the company's development philosophy -- the balance scope, budget, and time -- Figueroa said that his team would introduce globalization issues earlier into the development process. In the past, schedule and budget forced the development group into trade-offs that made future work more difficult and costly. The lessons he shared echoed our research: Align global website strategy with corporate goals. Centralize the development of core technology. Satisfy real international market needs rather than trying to boil the ocean. Anyone laying out a global strategy would be well-advised to learn from Disney's experience.
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