With its acquisition of Trados earlier this year, SDL started pushing the notion of "global information management," which it says is driven by how "global enterprises operate in fast-moving and competitive markets, with shorter product lifecycles, new international competitors and changing customer expectations." We wrote about this in a series of technology reports earlier this year, but characterized this phenomenon as the "global content life cycle" encompassing the creation (author, transform, organize, index); use (access, search, distribute, leverage; and management (store, retain, dispose, evolve).

We’re always curious to see how (or whether) terms get picked up in the marketplace, so we googled "global content life cycle" and "global information management." Sigh. Our "global content life cycle" seems to be used by everybody, where "everybody" is defined as the set of individuals working at Common Sense Advisory. "Global information management" has a bit more pick-up, but the first hits are for the Journal of Global Information Management and some other more general uses, not the multilingual content management envisioned by SDL.

So we decided to look at whether SDL’s ecosystem partners posted the press release and used the term "global information management" at their websites. As of 23 November, it wasn’t looking very good.

• EMC Documentum had not posted the press release, nor had it used the term on its website.

• Interwoven — no press release, no GIM.
• Blast Radius — no press release and whoops, no search function at the website.
• Trisoft — front and center on its partner page.

• Tridion — no press release, no GIM.

• Astoria Software — we didn’t find the November press release, but a site search found this one.
• Day — no and no.
• XyEnterprise — nope and nope.

In its GIM ecosystem SDL included Alchemy and PASS, coding partners with localization engineering tools. Including these two is a good sign of openness and coopetition because SDL has a competing, albeit not traditionally competitive product, in this space. However, Alchemy has neither the press release nor site search to look for it. Over at PASS, there’s no press release and no GIM on the site.

Coining a term is not easy. Others need a reason to use the new term, so SDL — or any other neologist — has to establish value. Large companies do so through spending and market momentum, while smaller firms need to demonstrate that it captures the essence of the issue but without being proprietary to the coiner. The jury is still out on "global information management," and we can’t wait for GILT — that unfortunate acronym for globalization, internationalization, localization, and translation — to complete its slow journey to the terminology scrapheap.