tems. These differences can be grouped into three categories: factors that affect the
design of systems, factors that affect the operation of systems, and factors that affect
government regulation.
(i) Factors Influencing System Design. In a domestic environment, there is usually a
single language used for business activities. While it is often presumed that English
is the universal language of information technology, the reality is that many countries
prefer to use their own language at the “interface”^3 level of a system. (The difficulty
here is the character set that the operating system and the application system sup-
port.) Most of the common systems used in the United States support only 128 char-
acters.^4 This creates difficulty in representing extra alphabetic characters. For exam-
ple, the Danish alphabet contains three additional characters, and many languages
contain inflection marks that are not part of the 128-character set. The major system
developers, have moved to an expanded 256-character set, which incorporates many
of these additional characters, but the issue is complicated, for example, in the han-
dling of non-Western languages, such as Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic. This is not
simply a problem of transliteration. Not only does the system have to accommodate
the internal representation of these symbols but the fonts supported by printer and
displays, and the dictionaries in word processors need to be coordinated. Apple has
gone further than most companies in modifying its operating system to produce dif-
ferent country-specific systems from a common core and there is a major interna-
tional standardization effort underway in this area.
Another difficult representation problem is currency. Most domestic environments
consist of a single currency. But international firms need to handle a variety of cur-
rencies and be able to convert among them. The issue is complicated by volatility in
exchange rates and the timing of these conversions needs to be specified and consis-
tent. This places additional demands on systems that aggregate financial information
from subsidiaries in different countries.
(ii) Factors Influencing System Operation. A domestic environment often operates in
one or at most three time zones. This means that there are times during a 24-hour pe-
riod when a system can be brought down for maintenance or for other support activ-
ities without incurring adverse operational effects. In anticipation of operating in
such an environment, a system may be designed not to accept inputs during these pe-
riods and to instead perform internal maintenance activities, such as updating trans-
lation tables. Operational staffing may be reduced greatly during such periods. How-
ever, systems that support worldwide activities must be prepared to accept inputs 24
hours a day. Such 24-by-7 systems, for example an online trading or a funds transfer
system, need to be designed so that all maintenance activities can be done at the same
time that operational processing is taking place.
Systems operating in different countries often create severe support demands. Not
28 • 4 INTERNATIONAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS(^3) The “interface level” means the inputs to or outputs from a system. It includes the display screens
and reports that are produced from an application system, the screens that are used for data input, and the
workstation keyboard.
(^4) Called the ASCII character set. It contains the 26 capital letters and 26 lowercase letters of the Eng-
lish alphabet, the 10 Arabic numerals 0–9, and 66 special characters, including punctuation and mone-
tary symbols.