I was almost whistling as I walked into my office on a bright warm Monday morning. Last week had been a good one. After months of working weekends and late into the evening, the team pulled together and the latest version of our OpeNsecureInformatiON (ONION) passed the Globalization Verification Test with flying colors. All there was left to do is to roll it out into the field offices - which should be a snap comparing to what we have gone through. I might even be able to take that Caribbean vacation that I had been promising myself for months. I did not have a meeting until 10AM so I could spend some time surfing the web looking for a good package.
I opened my Notes mail and right on the top was an e-mail from the CIO asking me to see her immediately. It was obvious she wanted to congratulate me on a job well done, I thought. So I ran up the stairs to her corner office, knocked, went in, and sat down. What she said next started a chain of events that stretched my professional mettle to the extreme.
"There was a board meeting this past weekend,” she said, “Business is doing well but we need to expand. So the board voted to open up the new office in Albonistan next month. We voted to have everything ready and working before the competitors even know we are there. You will have to ensure that ONION meets our needs there because I do not want our IT department to be the stumbling block to this very important initiative."
"So much for the Caribbean," I thought as I walked out of her office. "Albonistan, where in the world is that? What languages do they speak? What do they look like? How do I even get started to figure out what need to be done?" These questions were swirling in my head as I sat down again in front of my computer, no longer as happy as I was just 20 minutes ago.
After I thought about it a bit, I realized that my fear was misplaced. We had created our processes after a lot of thought. Unless we were far off mark, the pain would not be that bad. I got to work immediately and gave myself two weeks to get the analysis done. ONION was well-designed and already used in 15 countries. But it is a complex integration of multiple software components so we may have to break deployment into phases. If we were a bit lucky and got this right, there was no reason why we couldn’t get it done. I just hoped there would be no surprises. Getting this right would be an important achievement in my career.
I called a team meeting for 11 am to get started with everyone.
When we had gathered in the conference room, the team was just as happy as I had been. I smiled inwardly – thinking how they would look when I gave them the news. After the light-hearted banter which I was guilty of leading, we settled down and I told them the news. I also told them that getting ONION ready for Albonistan cannot jeopardize the current roll-out plan. First they thought I was joking. When they realized I was serious though, they became unusually quiet. I couldn’t help a smile – I wondered if I was becoming a sadist!
The team got more excited when I suggested that this could be an opportunity for us to try our new strategy of using Open Source platforms for the lower end applications in our company. We would evaluate how much of the applications could work on Open Source platforms in Albonistan and use them wherever feasible. Since Albonistan is not an emerging economy yet, the support for it on proprietary systems might not have been fully tested. They might not be fully supported on Open Source platforms either, but since we would have full access to the source code, we would be able to fix them if necessary.
After the news settled in, I explained that our processes were mature enough to expect business-expansion to Albonistan to be routine. It was a good opportunity to test our skills and methods to see if we had really crossed the repeatable and defined capability-maturity levels to reach a managed process for globalization.
Our activity-map would once again serve as the guide for our progress. We would evaluate the resources relevant to Albonistan as we went along. At the end of this process, we should have a clear definition of the goals and the associated activities. | 
