Start small. Nariman Karimi, CIO of Alghanim Industries, had his first major experience leading cultural change as head of infrastructure for Unilever's Asia operations. Karimi's job was to set up a single IT operation in Singapore to serve 15 Asian countries that had operated autonomously. Karimi had to act to counter the perception that the new regional organization was the first brick to be removed from their country's power base.

"We never would have generated support if I had announced that from now on I would set all budgets and that all country IT leaders would report to me," says Karimi. "Instead, we set up a small team to centralize Lotus Notes servers, a nonthreatening way to showcase the model."

Once Karimi and his team had a few small victories behind them, they secured a time slot in the monthly meetings of the Asia presidents. "If you get a spot like that where you can report good news, you can build real momentum for cultural change," he says.

Involve everyone. In 2003, Joe ­Spagnoletti, now CIO, was the North American deployment lead for Campbell Soup's program to roll out a single global instance of SAP. "My job went well beyond technology," says Spagnoletti. "We needed to transition our leadership from their long tradition of independent operations to having an enterprise mind-set."

The first go-live was in Canada, so Spagnoletti had employees from the U.S. business, which was next in line, participate in the Canadian deployment. Then, during the U.S. rollout, staff from Canada joined the deployment team along with staff scheduled for future locations.