What are global organizations?

The marketing team is located in Singapore, the IT in Bangalore, and headquarter is based in London. Call it global organization? Sure, you can. This is one type of global organization; the departments are acting from different continents, but the functional responsibility is clearly assigned to one site. The challenges for a team lead, project manager, or business analyst are the interfaces between the different departments. This type of global organization has external interfaces which are cross functional and cross cultural.

However, there is another type of global organization. For example, an IT department responsible for the company accounting software. The project is managed in London, the database software developed in Mumbai, and the user interface configured in Hong Kong. Additionally the accounting rules are adapted according regulatory rules by the local operation teams in each country. All functions are needed to generate one product, the global accounting software, and all functions are reconciled in one IT department. So you still have the external interfaces to Finance, Accounting, Sales, and every other department using the software, but additionally you have internal interfaces within the department. E.g. the database developer in Mumbai needs support from an interface programmer in Hong Kong and vice versa. As this kind of global organization has internal and external interfaces, it is much more difficult to manage compared to organizations with external interfaces only.

When I write about global organizations, I reference to organizations with

• internal and external interfaces
• cross functional and cross cultural interfaces

The biggest challenges in my career were the alignment of internal interfaces; to make worldwide teams with different backgrounds, interests and goals, pulling in the same direction.