One of Coulter's challenges has been to find CIOs to handle localization issues in all 130 of AES's businesses -- not an easy task in places such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Cameroon. It requires a global search, often for expatriates who want to return to their native countries.

Another challenge has been to create two collocated, outsourced global data centers in Virginia and London, into which each country's systems connect via a WAN or a virtual private network, replacing 10 large data centers and 120 smaller ones. All systems operating in the businesses use common components and a common infrastructure, based on HP blade servers running SAP ERP applications on Linux. The dual-data-center model enables load balancing using F5 Networks Inc. 's Big-IP and disaster recovery via Oracle Corp. 's DataGuard in combination with Real Application Clusters. "We consider it to be one data center in two locations," Coulter says. Application development is all done in India.

All countries will share common SAP templates, allowing for individual businesses to make tweaks for local variances, particularly to meet country-specific regulations. "In some of our businesses, like in Brazil, the regulator gives you a 48-hour deadline to make changes, so there's high volatility, and the local businesses need to respond quickly," Coulter says.

While the infrastructure is now complete, and the billing and customer-care modules are coming online, there have been plenty of localization issues to tackle. For instance, SAP doesn't support the Ukrainian language, so Russian was substituted. Attitude Is Key

Coulter attributes AES's success to its "steady as you go" approach. But he doesn't think he could have played a role in these achievements without his global moorings from previous jobs at Racal Electronics PLC , PepsiCo Inc. , Citibank and other companies.