CIO — I’ve forgotten my high school French. I don’t speak German or Italian. And I speak just enough Spanish to get by on vacation in Mexico. So perhaps it was wishful thinking on my part to assume that IT was a universal language and that it would be easy to blend the skills of IT staffs from seven countries.
What was I thinking?
When I became CIO for U.S. Can in late 2000, I walked into a number of challenges and really didn’t give our people across the pond much thought. My first impression of U.S. Can’s European IT managers, who are based in the United Kingdom, was that they had fancy PowerPoint presentations and fancier visions for IT. And I noticed that they spelled everything with s’s instead of z’s.
They were very proper and had immense disdain for our old AS/400-based systems. They had dreams of RFIDs on each and every one of the 2 billion cans we make annually. It seemed like they were flying, and we were crawling.
Some of the U.S. staffers had a pretty negative attitude toward their IT brethren in Europe. All that really linked us was a Sprint WAN. We had no other systems in common?not even e-mail.
One day, not more than two months into my new gig, our ISP went bankrupt, shut its doors and cut off service with no notice. We were dead in the water. My first thought was to call Sprint and ask them to be our ISP. But there was only so much Sprint could do immediately. While we were in the weeping and gnashing of teeth stage, we vented to the only other people who could identify with our pain: our European IT. While I was running around soothing the fears of the executive management team, my network guy and their network guy started talking, and they figured out that we could bounce data across Sprint’s WAN and use the European ISP as a backup. Within a day, we were back up. Slow, but up. Our data was flowing, and the ancient e-mail system was working again. All of a sudden, these two IT shops were joined at the hip, bonded through crisis.
This initial encounter prompted us to start sharing. There was no plan for any sort of corporate globalization; we were just a group of kindred spirits who found commonality in our business challenges.
Even so, the language barrier between our English and theirs, especially those with a Welsh accent, was huge. The most common phrase heard was, "What did you say?" We finally began using videoconferencing to read facial expressions and body language. Because of the time difference, when our meetings started we were on our second cup of coffee and the European staffers were thinking about stopping at the pub on their way home.
