There is an old Irish joke about a hapless Englishman asking a local for directions on the Emerald Isle. In the end, the Irishman says, "Y'know, if I were going to Balbriggan I would not start from here at all."
When trying to create coherent technology standards across the globe to lower costs, your average CIO finds himself in a similar position, says Andy Kyte, research fellow at analyst firm Gartner. "Anybody can design the perfect end state of IT to support the business. If you draw it and show it to the board, they would say, 'yes, we will have that'.
"Nearly always you are faced with the more difficult challenge of managing the transition from a heterogeneous legacy environment.
"They will have multiple datacentres, enterprise resource planning, disparate business processes, markets and cultures. The general response of anybody looking at the requirement to globalise is, 'I would not start from here'."
Yet it is a challenge many global businesses see as essential to overcome as they strive to grow without facing a massive increase in support costs.
Unilever's globalisation path
Few companies exemplify the trend towards globalisation more than Unilever. Last year the consumer goods multinational - with an annual turnover of £27bn - extended a deal with BT to manage its global network infrastructure in an effort to lower costs.
In the contract, worth nearly £100m annually, BT took over the operation of Unilever's fixed and mobile voice, data and video services for about 1,000 sites in 104 countries. In total, 119 Unilever staff were transferred to BT.
Unilever sought to save 20% on network spending, which BT aimed to achieve largely by standardising and rationalising the huge variety of technologies it was using around the globe.
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