Those sensitivities came to the fore when Danback's group began creating a portfolio of applications and technology standards. From the outset, it found just a small number of de facto standards, such as Microsoft Office, that were already in use by most of XL Capital's businesses. To develop further standards, the group gathered senior IT representatives from around the world to collect input. But as the representatives returned home to impose the agreed-upon standards, it soon became clear that a decision made by consensus didn't always fly if the messenger didn't buy into it himself.

"Say we decided on Microsoft Exchange for a global e-mail standard. Well, the people who had argued for Notes would go back to their bosses and say, 'Here's what happened,' and it would work its way through to the business leaders with a negative spin, until we were told, 'You're absolutely not changing our e-mail system,' " Danback explains.

Lesson learned: No IT buy-in, no business buy-in. So for the next standards-setting meeting, Danback's group invited representatives at the CIO level. "If you have a strong, powerful CIO who didn't like what we were doing, he had much more influence over the local business than we did," Danback says. "It was clear that while many decisions were technical, they required executive-level participation."

Culture clashes

It's important to realize that all these negotiations happen among people from different cultures whose rules you need to understand to be effective, Danback says. For instance, the culture in the Asia-Pacific region discourages people from showing dissent even if they disagree. "You need to be assured you've got real buy-in and that it's not superficial," Danback says.