counter sales consultants. To support the high-touch sales model, systems were built to automate counter operations, to track transactions for each customer, and to provide analysis of sales/marketing plans by customer segment. The systems significantly increased the efficiency for the thousands of sales consultants in Japan. The SKII line, together with the enabling systems, has been successfully deployed to the rest of the world.

Table 2 summarizes the general characteristics of these three structural IT elements, across the companies that we studied.

Configuring the Global-
Local Balance in the
Structural elements

Although the four MNCs we studied are from different industries, they all had implemented similar structural elements of shared services, CoEs, and VMs. This observation suggests some convergence regarding the global structuring of IT resources, as they all seek to simultaneously achieve global scale, while providing local responsiveness and innovation. The accompanying figure summarizes the model for structuring global IT that emerges from our study.

However, multinationals still need
to make trade-offs among these stra-
tegic objectives. Managers seek these
trade-offs by varying configuration of
each structural element and distrib-
uting resources among them. One of
the most common trade-offs we ob-
served was between achieving scale
and responsiveness. Companies that
sought greater scale tended to have
a single global shared service unit.
Underwood Financials, for example,
has a single global shared service
unit in Singapore that serves all busi-
ness units worldwide over three work
shifts. While first-line support was
available 24× 7, more sophisticated
level 3 support was still centralized at
headquarters. Responsiveness to com-
plex problems that occurred in other
time zones was therefore a challenge.
At the time of this study, the head of
shared services was lobbying for level
3 support in the Asian time zone as
well. Other MNCs traded off global
scale for greater regional responsive-
ness. Microsoft, for example, operates
three regional shared services units,
covering North America, Europe-Mid-
dle East-Africa and Latin America, and
Asia respectively.

A model for structuring global It.

It Leadership

IT governance
design
I T budget and portfolio
management
Enterprise risk
management
Enterprise architecture
planning

Centers
of Excellence
Shared
Services

Deep technical and business knowledge coordinated centrally Innovation, solution delivery May be virtually coordinated Set of global services: mandatory and discretionary Multiple locations globally with outsourcing partners choice and control with transparent unit costs Designed to create an integrated shared platform

Value
Managers

Maximize IT value local customer advocates corporate IT representation Implement global programs