Clearing the hurdles of international technology implementations.

• Author: Phillips, John T.
• Position: Cover story

Making an action plan that addresses the infrastructure limitations and the regulatory, legal, social, and cultural boundaries and norms of the countries where an enterprise wishes to expand is critical to successfully implementing information technologies globally.

Implementing technology-based information management (IM) systems can be a nightmare. Yet, candid vendors of IM systems will be very clear that how the technology is implemented is at least as important to its success as the product's capabilities; complete access to all of the product's features is required for the organization to fully realize its benefits.

Technical issues are to be expected; implementing a new technology may require operating systems upgrades, software integrations, accurate data migrations, and more modern hardware or networking infrastructures.

Well-known human factors to be attended to include training for the application interface, planning for the system rollout, and gaining buy-in for organizational adoption of the technology.

All of these issues must be thoroughly addressed to get maximum return on investment from any system implementation. And, extending an implementation to international business environments will compound these challenges.

Technology Infrastructure Issues

Implementing "global technology"--any information processing and storage technology that can reach across geopolitical boundaries--throughout an international enterprise can make both the goals and the impediments to achieving those goals vastly more complex.

Determining Network Readiness

International network readiness is critical to information technology implementation and varies drastically among regions and jurisdictions.

In many geographic locations, there is an absence of networking infrastructure, supportive technology vendors, or trained personnel. Organizations must determine whether it is best to send trained individuals to sites where servers and applications will be located or to train local individuals in IT systems maintenance.

The correct decision may depend on whether there are trained and educated individuals in that location already who can receive additional training to become system administrators. How these questions are answered can have a major impact on system performance.

Unfortunately, the implementation of these technologies is very inconsistent around the globe. For instance, India is a good example of a country where records are valued, but it is swamped in managing paper records, due in part to a lack of technology infrastructure to support electronic records management.

As another example, the authors of The Global Information Technology Report 2013--Growth and Jobs in a Hyperconnected World write that "Asia is home to some of the world's wealthiest, most successful economies in the world and also to some of its poorest. Unsurprisingly, a similarly profound diversity characterizes Asia's digital landscape, thus making it impossible to draw a uniform picture of the region. The most digitized and innovative nations--the Asian Tigers--on the planet are next to some of the least-connected ones. Nowhere else does the regional digital divide run as deeply as it does in Asia."

Locating Servers/Data

If an international enterprise wants to share data among employees in U.S., European, and Asia/Pacific countries, it may be a challenge to decide where it locates the servers, software, and data.

Most businesses are not comfortable with public discussion of these issues in great detail. However, in "off the record" talks, some admit they often segment data in database applications so that specific data will be stored in a distributed manner across different servers to allow compliance with the laws and regulations governing the origin of that data.

The unfortunate...