From that process, the list was cut in half before the meetings with the CEO, then down to 100 after those meetings, making the transition more manageable, he said.

Frederick Danback, vice president of global technology architecture at insurance and reinsurance company XL Global Services Inc., said his biggest challenge has been XL's acquisition of new companies over the past few years, resulting in a total of 17 different IT organizations in 30 countries.

"Management has decreed that they'll become one, without borders," he said, and that has been a daunting process. But making it happen smoothly is a process now in the hands of the IT staffers. They've been working to break down the cultural and process borders between the operations around the world to allow it to begin to work as one, Danback said.

For much of the company, the U.S.-based culture tends to be more entrepreneurial by nature and move more quickly, which is distinctly different from how things are done abroad, particularly in Europe, he said. "We found in the Swiss culture, it's all about putting it all on paper first" and moving after thoughtful analysis, said Danback. "We found by adding these different cultures [together], they gave us some additional discipline, while we gave them some agility."

Don Gibson, vice president of e-commerce and infrastructure at shipping and printing vendor FedEx Kinko's Office and Print Services Inc. in Dallas said his company's biggest challenge today is language translation because of its presence in 225 countries, where people use around 18 different languages. By creating language repositories across all operations, the company expects to save millions of dollars annually by not having to duplicate language translations in documents, forms and other systems.