At Royal Dutch Shell, negotiating is central to selecting which applications will land in the company's standard portfolio. To do this, IT launches an investigation into where best practices are already being delivered in a particular region and then leverages that application for consistent delivery around the world.

The most successful project to date, says Jay Crotts, CIO in the lubricants and business-to-business segments, is the implementation of a CRM tool, which was based on an application being used in Malaysia. So far, it has been implemented in 16 out of the 100 countries Shell operates in, with full rollout targeted for 2010. Despite being a somewhat low-tech tool, "it literally receives applause by the sales force community," Crotts says.

Despite the CRM tool's success, it's not easy for users to accept the idea that their own application might not be selected for the global portfolio. "There's a lot of natural resistance," Crotts says. The best way to defuse the emotional turmoil, he says, is to be as quantitative in your methodology as you can be.

For instance, at Shell, the team that chooses the applications is made up of IT representatives from various countries and regions. The group uses key performance indicators as well as other qualitative measures to score the application candidates and then meets to debate which will become the global standard. When there is dissent, a rule kicks in: No one is allowed to recommend his own country's application. This forces the team to analyze which one would be second best. It also makes for a less heated discussion, Crotts says. "When your esteemed colleagues don't pick your application, it becomes clear that it's not the best choice," he says.

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