Few companies have as much on-the-ground familiarity with remote locations around the globe as Deutsche Post World Net, the corporate parent of Deutsche Post and DHL, a logistics and parcel delivery business. So perhaps it was natural that DPWN would emerge as a leader in the creation of a globally connected IT-development and operations model that has consolidated many of the company's once-fragmented application-development and data-processing locations into three supercenters, in Cyberjaya, Malaysia; Prague; and Scottsdale, Arizona, in the United States. Along with some outsourced help in India, these facilities keep DPWN's IT operations and development running around the clock. They are complemented by another application-development center, in Bonn, Germany.

Getting to such a high degree of consolidation wasn't easy—or fully planned. DPWN's managing director for IT services, Stephen McGuckin, who over the past decade has held a series of senior IT positions at DHL and its parent, didn't set out to create a 24-hour IT-development and operations program when he began consolidating the company's Asian IT centers, back in 1997. His goal then was to reduce costs and to improve the productivity of a host of IT-development locations for specific countries. After a thorough study of the possibilities, he...