Obviously, the applications have to accommodate local business laws and practices. But because they will be centrally hosted in multiple data centers around the world rather than on individual countries' servers, it's imperative that the company develop a change-control process that determines which customizations are really needed. Once vetted, those changes get incorporated into the base application. "You've got to take the local tweaking out, or you don't have a consistent application anymore," Crotts says.

But people find it hard to distinguish between the business norms that must be accommodated for fiscal or legal reasons and the tweaks they merely want to be included because that's how they're used to operating, he says. "They'll throw up many reasons why [an application] won't meet their business requirements, but after engaging them in a discussion about it, you find you can resolve the problems with some small modifications," Crotts says.

To successfully negotiate these issues, he says, you really need to dig into understanding the nuances of international laws, such as how taxes get calculated or -- on an even more granular level -- which countries accept only cash payments or allow only legal business owners to make payments for delivered goods.

Those who wish to lead a global IT organization are best off gaining international experience ahead of time, says George Coulter, CIO at The AES Corp., an Arlington, Va.-based company that generates and distributes electric power to 27 countries on five continents.

As the company's first CIO, Coulter is helping AES transform itself from a decentralized company with very few sophisticated IT systems in place to a company with hybrid centralized/ decentralized operations supported by a common IT platform across two data centers running common business processes.