If you have worked in Asia Pacific for long enough you will know that geographic knowledge is surprisingly sparse on the ground once you leave the airspace. It is an airspace in which you can fly from Sydney to Tokyo in the same time you can fly East Cost-West Coast return in the US. Asia Pacific is a big big place.

As an Asia Pacific employee you will also remember the multiple times that you have been sent a web lead by head office for your Austrian counterpart. Or most memorably for me the CEO who believed that Kuala Lumpur was a 3-4 hour drive from Sydney. In fairness it's not all one-way traffic. Many Asia Pacific employees have felt the ire of confusing "the United States" with the four countries that constitute North America. 

While it is no surprise that the global definitions for Asia Pacific ultimately determine the strategies and approach for most multinational companies, it is an ongoing surprise that the region is so expansively bundled when it comes to in-country insights.  End-user organisations all over Australia know about the glass ceiling that exists with international ICT market research companies whose lowest data level is often aggregated to Asia Pacific, yet it is the international vendors who continue to retract funding to meaningless geographic levels when economies change. 

There is no doubting that it is a tough time for everyone at the moment and most organisations are undertaking a back to basics approach to all expenditure. It is time to make every dollar stretch as far as possible. The reality is that the geographic differences of the Asia Pacific market means a single ICT research dollar cannot stretch from Sydney to Tokyo, or even to Singapore for that matter. The only outcome of that approach is bad data, bad advice, wasted campaign and strategy budgets, and unhappy end-user customers. Vendors can no longer choose to invest in an Asia Pacific strategy without corresponding commitments to in-country level data. And most of the big international brands don't provide that insight.

Perhaps the most topical analogy I can draw at the moment for the choice between in-country and international ICT research is the current debate starting to gain momentum around the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN). It focuses on the merits of a Fibre-to-the-Node (in the vicinity of your home) versus a Fibre-to-the-Home (into your home) approach. FTTH is the true last mile nirvana of connectivity that will put all service providers in direct contact with their customers.

Correspondingly, while there can be little debate about the increase in demand for in-country data any more, for the last mile to be viable ICT research, just like connectivity, needs to be highly-reliable, economical, scalable, and available. In Australia, it ticks all those boxes now.

According to Wikipedia, "the last mile of a network to the end-user is also the first mile from the end-user to the world." As an example of one challenge that this will present for vendors seeking to do business in-country is where their end-user customers are seeking "first mile" advice from in-country ICT providers when the vendors themselves fail to engage a "last-mile" perspective on their own strategies. In that inevitability the Asia Pacific glass ceiling may become a true barrier to adoption of their solutions.