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For Andre Spatz, CIO of UNICEF, the challenge is always the same: deploying mission-critical systems in unpredictable and often dangerous settings, like war-torn Liberia or flood-ravaged Haiti, where communications access can be severely limited or altogether absent.
The solution is always the same, too: a standardized "fly-away" satellite kit that enables an IT team to set up voice, fax, data, e-mail and even videoconferencing capabilities in about four hours. Emergency workers for The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund -- whose territory includes 160 developing countries -- also gain access to the relief organization's back-end systems and a full suite of office applications. This is because the fly-away kits, which UNICEF developed jointly with its IP satellite services provider, are built to the same standards as UNICEF's overall global IT infrastructure.
In other words, everybody does the same things in the same way, which is the Holy Grail in the world of global IT operations, according to Spatz and other Premier 100 IT Leaders.
Consensus Across Cultures
"In UNICEF, we have a very decentralized operating model, but we also have centralized the whole of IT," which uses the same technology standards and business processes around the world, Spatz says. "That's worked to reduce costs, reduce diversity and improve operations and security."

Andre Spatz, CIO of UNICEF Image Credit: Bernd Auers

But getting there isn't easy. Cultural barriers, language differences and business processes that can vary widely from country to country are just a few of the more predictable yet challenging hurdles that global CIOs face.
There are often also political rats' nests to contend with. IT groups accustomed to doing things one way in their home countries frequently view their counterparts from other areas of the world with distrust. Rarely do the groups take the same approach to business and technology issues, even when they work for the same global company.
For all of those reasons, building trust must come first and foremost on any global IT project agenda, CIOs say.
"It means endless hours of consensus-building," says John S. Parkinson, vice president and chief technologist at Capgemini in Rosemont, Ill. The company recently completed the deployment of global single-sign-on capabilities to 53,000 employees in 40 countries. "This has been a two-year journey that has simplified use of our distributed intranet and extranet for all our staff and reduced support costs by over 25%," Parkinson says.
Before, Capgemini had more than a dozen ways to sign onto its sprawling network of global systems, with only one or two of those sign-on techniques