While each governance model has specific best practices and potential pitfalls associated with it, there are several must-dos that apply to any global governance model.

Involve senior leadership. Senior leadership from all your regions, including the smallest ones, should be part of the governance model decision-making, advises Bayer's Abreu. Through involvement, you will lessen any feelings of disenfranchisement and encourage better acceptance of the final model.

Be appropriately flexible. No matter what model you choose, it's important to be flexible to a degree. Organizations often doom the success of their model by going to extremes, says Abreu. Push too much customization, and costs skyrocket. Or force an absolute centralized standard or practice without taking the local market or culture into consideration, and you get backlash. "There will be backlash or failure because it won't work or won't be accepted," says Abreu

Maintain visibility into remote IT. Make sure the CIO and senior leaders have strong visibility into local IT for oversight/control and to identify collaboration opportunities. Within FedEx's IT organization, CIO Beth Galetti holds quarterly best-practice forums in each region for each IT function. This helps with the dissemination of knowledge and quality IT practices among multiple countries. Galetti also relies on boards made up of business function heads from each global region to gain visibility into major projects being proposed across FedEx, as well as the business needs and plans for each region. The review boards examine all IT projects that require more than 40 hours of development work.

Leverage tools for resource insight, communication and collaboration. Simple applications, such as time reporting and project tracking tools, can provide significant insights into local IT resources. A foundation built with communication and collaboration tools is also helpful when staff and ideas are spread across many time zones and continents. For example, ON Semiconductor adopted collaboration tools NetMeeting and SharePoint to enable its widely distributed IT staff of 325 to share information and keep initiatives moving globally without having to use videoconferencing.

Energy company Hess has been using SharePoint across the entire company for several years, is starting to roll out instant messaging and is evaluating ways to do more than standard teleconferencing or videoconferencing. To that end, Hess is considering telepresence systems such as Cisco's TelePresence and Hewlett-Packard's Halo Collaboration Studio. Halo is a virtual collaboration technology in which a studio is set up in a company's office such that the entire environment (people, background projections, notes and more) is transmitted from location to location and Halo room to Halo room instead of just the scene directly in front of the videoconferencing camera.

Such technologies can facilitate international collaboration, but not without defining good collaboration processes first, warns Hess CIO Pete Walton. "I strongly believe that rolling out collaborative technologies in a company culture that doesn't know how to collaborate is a recipe for CIO failure," he says. "The best technologies in the world can't force people into unnatural actions."