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A Global Culture
In 2000, Kirkpatrick and a small team toured all the company's locations, interviewing colleagues about their business requirements -- the first of many intelligence-gathering missions abroad.
"Everyone did things differently in every country," says Kirkpatrick. "There were no global processes. No one at Sunrise knew everything that was going on. The different groups didn't share information. Most important was to get their buy-in, to get them to think that maybe their process wasn't the best possible process. People were skeptical at first."
Travel and videoconferencing were important in building relationships, especially since IT staffers in one country might report to someone in Longmont.
"People in Germany are working on projects outside the country," says Kirkpatrick. "It's really hard for the German managers to understand that they have someone working on a project in a different country."
Cooper sent team members to different countries to fill in for vacationing staffers. The result was a greater travel budget but a declining overall IT budget as workers gained experience and formed a stronger transnational team. Yet not everyone was able to make the leap to the new culture.
"Especially at a midmarket company, some people are more comfortable working within their four walls," says Cooper. "We had to lose some of those people. Flexibility of hours is implicit in IT. We used to have a lot more options for downtime."
Developing global relationships with partners was also a challenge. Some consulting firms did business on a country-by-country basis. Cooper wanted a single point of contact -- which he eventually got.
"It was really difficult to get these companies to think on this basis, even really big companies," says Cooper. "Maybe we fell into a midmarket account, and the person dealing with us was only interested in a Rocky Mountain-region revenue, not our rollout in Australia. It took time to get partners to support us in a global way."
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