Accenture did not say how many IT staff would be attending the "academy" and my repeated calls and e-mails to Unilever went unanswered -- except for an automated e-mail asking me to put my request in writing (which of course I did).

As far as infrastructure goes, there is the danger of absolute metaphysical lock-in. Eventually there must be some kind of consolidation at the platform level if the benefits of a service architecture, composite applications, and business process modeling are the megatrends Greenbaum says they are. By adopting a single SAP system across Europe, Unilever is tying its fortune to SAP NetWeaver.

The other challenge is that Unilever is a company that sells highly localized products. Greenbaum, obviously a world traveler, tells me that a washing machine's wash cycle in most of Europe is one and a half hours whereas it is half an hour in the United States, which calls for a different kind of soap product. So, although you may increase efficiencies in the back office, on the customer-facing side you still have to deal with localization.

After examining outsource contracts from 2003 through 2005, outsourcing consultancy TPI finds that the claim that outsourcing can reduce costs by 60 percent is highly inflated. If you add in professional fees, severance pay, and governance costs, the average savings is closer to 15 percent, TPI says.

The truth is that not every company has the command and control structure to make this kind of change stick. And I suppose the winners will be those companies that understand that before doing anything extreme.