The executives had different needs for their distinct global businesses, but their messages often revolved around the same core issues -- improving communications in languages and cultures around the world while finding ways to merge diverse IT systems and make the resulting systems work well for everyone in the larger operation.

For automotive fleet management vendor Des Plaines, Ill.-based Wheels Inc., the biggest IT hurdle recently has been a project to synthesize operations in 10 countries into one standardized system, said CIO Lawrence Buettner. "It was a major challenge for us to get everyone to agree on what we had to do," Buettner said. "We're going to spend a lot of time communicating -- overcommunicating -- what we have to do."

It's been a key process for the US$1 billion company, which is in the midst of an expansion across Europe.

Steven Silverman, vice president of IT at Bausch & Lomb Inc., a vision care, surgical supplies and pharmaceuticals vendor in Rochester, N.Y., said he has discovered that people in each of the company's divisions around the world apparently think their local operations are unique and can't be merged with the processes of others. The company didn't want that approach to continue, Silverman said. "To do common processes, you've got to work the way the products work, the way the business works," he said.

The presence of five different product lines, regional issues and other factors led the company to attack the problem by asking each of the divisions to list the individualized software and process modifications they thought they needed, which resulted in a list of some 300 different modifications. The company then brought those people and their requested changes directly before the CEO, where they had to defend their arguments.