I, too, am excited about the opportunities of a global economy, but I'm also concerned that executives are in danger of woefully underestimating what it takes to build a truly global IT presence. Consider the following examples:

-- A multibillion-dollar consumer packaged goods firm has standardized on SAP for ERP, but because of a lack of consistency in business processes across the organization, it has been unable to implement a single instance outside the U.S. As a result, it is not getting the maximum value out of this significant IT investment.

-- Google recently announced that it will set up a new site for the Chinese market. It will censor itself to satisfy Chinese government authorities.

-- A CIO at a manufacturing firm laments that countries outside of the U.S. have pushed back on some corporate technology standards, claiming that these technologies are too costly for emerging markets.

I could go on, but you get the point: Doing global IT is a lot harder than it looks. Today, I run into lots of CIOs at companies that operate around the world, but almost none has a truly global IT organization. Almost none has a standard set of IT services that is consistent everywhere. Almost none has a centralized mechanism for managing risk, compliance and regulatory matters. Almost none has an enterprise architecture that stretches across continents. Almost none has a central resource-management capability that allows human capital to be managed and leveraged optimally across the globe.