By: Paawan Bhatia (Vendor Manager) & Jasmine Attfield (Board Administration and Communications)
MCIS believes that language services should be of excellent quality for the sake of the end user, affordable for the sake of the service provider, and well-paid for the sake of language professionals. While some might view those goals as competing, MCIS believes that the key to improving language services on all of those counts is through innovation.
Innovation is possible in all aspects of the language service industry, but when we sat down to consider where to invest our time and resources, we decided to put some of our focus on the fundamentals: our interpretation management system (IMS).
Why build a better IMS? Consider this: MCIS provides a full suite of language solutions in over 300 languages to hundreds of service providers anywhere and anytime they’re needed. To make this happen, we work with thousands of language professionals around the world who each have their own schedules and expertise. Making sure that we make the best possible match between the assignment and the language professional requires the efficient management of an overwhelming amount of information. Any improvement in the efficiency of that system will have a huge impact on the quality of the experience for all of our stakeholders.
So we are getting to work! The new IMS we are working on will change the way we create assignments, create profiles, book language professionals, complete financial transactions, and report back to our customers and stakeholders. Some of the features we are developing include geo-spatial screening that will allow for the prioritization of language professionals closest to the assignment, calendar management that will enable language professionals to alert us when they will be unavailable for assignments, and a mobile application that language professionals can download on their phones to facilitate communication between all parties.
These changes will enable us to more effectively identify the best possible language professional for an assignment based on location, availability, and expertise, quickly alert and secure the language professional for the assignment, and facilitate quick and detailed reporting upon assignment completion.
In order to realize language access as a human right, we need to be continuously leveraging technological advancements, responding to client feedback, and working in partnership with language professionals. Constantly improving our IMS is foundational for the rest of the work we do to those ends.