Yahoo Inc.'s technology group has its standards, and it doesn't like to deviate from them. Much of its growth in recent years has come from acquisitions in the United States and abroad, and it's critical that the company is consistent worldwide with its financial, customer-relationship-management, sales-force-automation, and security software, senior VP and CIO Lars Rabbe says. "If you want to be good at scaling, you need to standardize," he says.

Sometimes, though, standardization doesn't make sense. In China, where total daily page views of Yahoo's search properties exceeded 60 million by the end of 2004, the credit-card industry still is evolving, so customers sometimes pay for service with bank cards. The billing modules in Yahoo's financials software weren't set up to handle that, so Yahoo's Chinese IT staff worked with the company's central development staff in Sunnyvale, Calif., to create a billing system that works for Chinese customers.

Yahoo, like most other companies, needs to think and act globally. Twenty-six percent of its nearly $3.6 billion in net revenue last year was generated internationally, and international revenue grew a whopping 241% in 2004. At many of the fastest-growing U.S. companies, the biggest boost in year-to-year revenue comes from international markets. With so many dollars at stake, it's vital for companies to build and run IT organizations that can effectively and efficiently support and foster their business operations across borders.

Companies that appear on the new InformationWeek Global 50 list can attest to that. The Global 50, which was complied using information provided by Reuters, is a ranking of businesses that have U.S. headquarters, operate in multiple countries, and have the greatest year-over-year growth as a percentage of revenue. Their international sales contributed an average of 52% of their net revenue last year, and average international revenue growth for these companies last year was 28%. Along with that growth comes complexity. Challenges--such as how to stretch IT resources, deal with tight budgets, maintain old systems, and deploy new ones--extend across multiple countries, cultures, languages, and infrastructures. The key to making it all work, many of the Global 50 companies say, is to adhere as much as possible to globally available systems and establish the IT culture, processes, and structure to support their use, while being flexible enough to accommodate differences when necessary and open enough to accept innovation from all corners.

Yahoo, the No. 1 company on the list, has dozens of IT staffers in dozens of countries. Many of the local IT groups consist of one or two people, sometimes playing dual roles as software engineers and support personnel, versus about 100 IT staffers in primary U.S. development centers. But Yahoo is expanding its strategy for creating "centers of excellence" outside the United States to handle critical software-engineering work for global implementations. It already has one center in Bangalore, India, and another might be created for Siebel Systems Inc. sales-force-automation-related work, Rabbe says.

At leading agricultural products provider Monsanto Co., which ranked fifth on the Global 50 list, the goal also is to continually focus the IT organization "on the importance of global capabilities and working as a global team," says Mark Showers, CIO of the company, which saw 46% of its $5.4 billion revenue in 2004 being generated outside the United States. The company's international revenue last year grew 79%. "The natural tendency is to localize applications and infrastructure--it's simply easier to do it that way," he says. "Unfortunately, a collection of local capabilities doesn't provide the optimal outcome for a corporation that works and acts globally."

	Yahoo is expanding its strategy for creating "centers of excellence" outside the United States, CIO Rabbe says. Photo by Eric Millette

At Monsanto, centers of expertise have been created for global-technology sharing and project work in specific technical areas. It has centralized both large-scale systems, such as enterprise-resource-planning software, as well as those that have common processes across multiple geographies, such as systems to support research and development. Where localized systems do exist, they tend to be customer-centric, catering to a particular demographic's needs or to satisfy important local reporting needs. Even at that, the base technology behind a customer-centric system still may be shared across geographies. "The more shared the better," Showers says.

The benefits of global IT standardization are many: It lowers costs by avoiding the need to invest in and support multiple disparate technologies, creates savings by giving a company more leverage in obtaining high-volume discounts, and frees time, money, and staff for critical priorities and new projects. "From an IT perspective, successful global companies say, 'How can we standardize?'" says A.T. Kearney analyst Dan Starta. "If [global companies] haven't already done that, they're behind."

Moog Inc., a maker of scientific and technical instruments, says standardizing IT across the company, which has about 140 IT employees, including about 40 in Europe and Asia, can help innovation. The company has standardized its wide area network globally, leading to annual savings equal to the salaries of one or two IT people, CIO Jim van Oss says. Innovation is hard when so many dollars and resources get tied up in necessary maintenance activities, such as fighting viruses, so saving money on a project like the WAN standardization "frees up discretionary budgets for innovation," he says.

Global companies need a way to efficiently vet innovative IT-related ideas from worldwide operations to ensure that they make sense for the business and can be exploited globally, rather than reinvented in each local IT department. At Moog, which ranked No. 34 on the Global 50, with 43% of its $939 million in revenue generated outside the United States last year, a governance process is in place to review proposals for new innovations, van Oss says. A committee that includes van Oss and other senior management, including the direct reports of Moog's global general managers of operations, meets about once a quarter to conduct these reviews.

Commercial Metals Co., which ranks No. 4 on the Global 50, takes a similar approach. Its IT council, which consists of IT and business executives from the Irving, Texas, company's worldwide locations, aims to reduce duplicate efforts and ensure that innovations and applications, including those per- fected by a business unit, can be shared across the company. Commercial Metals, which manufactures, recycles, and markets steel and metal products and related materials around the world, has a very decentralized IT organization, with three separate IT groups in the United States handling different lines of business and a fourth in Switzerland overseeing all international IT operations. Additional IT staffers are located in Australia.