In our recent research on content management at the global enterprise level, we noticed that none of the well-known CMS software suppliers offered any Asian companies in Asia among their customers. Some gave us Asian companies in the States and the U.K. as references, while others suggested that we speak with expatriate American and English firms using their software in Asia (for example, Johnson Stokes & Master). None pointed us to any Asian applications at non-Anglophone firms.

So we donned our forensic software investigation hats to figure out where the Asian CMS bodies are buried. First off, we hypothesized the obvious -- our Global Content Management Technology research showed limited Asian-language support in the CMS solutions built in Europe and the United States. Few CMS products offer end-to-end support for Asian languages across contributor, developer, and administrator interfaces. Even fewer offer complete documentation and local language support. Fundamentals like double-byte character support, data formats, and character code standards like

GB 18030 stand in the way of full localized support.

Our second obvious conclusion was that because we spoke only to North Atlantic software vendors, our sample naturally skewed to practitioners in North America and Europe. Finally, in our short-listing of CMS suppliers to interview for this research, we didn't find any Asian-sourced CMS products with large-scale deployments. That's the supply side analysis.

Then we considered the demand side for CMS in Asia and that's when our discussions got a bit more intriguing. Our conversations with companies on both sides of the Pacific suggest several factors that contribute to a lower adoption rate of formal CMS software solutions in Asia. Three are tied to personnel and perception issues, the fourth to where the content comes from:

1. The talent pool, especially in Japan, gravitates away from low-status and low-paying tasks such as authoring and translation. Writing software code is valued and seen as high-tech. Thus, you will not find CMS movers-and-shakers in the content trenches.
2. Professionals in Asia who write well tend to be high-cost employees -- and are more often expensive managers than content creators. These folks don't author web content.
3. How companies in Asia deploy their senior and junior staff members may pose an obstacle. The employer-employee relationship in Asia goes well beyond the west's concerns about merit and cost effectiveness, thus complicating how a process- and labor-intensive function such as content management might be implemented. That poses a big cultural obstacle to CMS deployment.
4. The size of the Anglophone consumer and business markets means that many large manufacturers traditionally source their content in English. Many large Asia-based manufacturers -- Canon, Fujitsu, Samsung, Sony, and Toyota, to name a few -- have staffed technical publications groups in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Because of cost and capacity issues in the translation market, many Asian firms use English as the source language for ultimate multilingual delivery in Europe and the Americas. That's changing, though. Our sources tell us that more and more firms, especially in China and Korea, are initially authoring in their own languages.

We have no doubt that CMS will ultimately play an important role in China's IT and manufacturing industries. Meawhile, our CSI: Beijing team will continue investigating the case of the missing Asian-language CMS applications.