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Local Goes Global
Aaron is the former editor of ProjectsAtWork.com
With IT shops in 73 countries doing good work but doing it their own way, employment services leader Manpower decided it was time to govern globally, execute locally. That meant leveraging common processes and tools without stamping out entrepreneurship and innovation. Here’s a conversation on how they’re doing it.
In 2005, employment services provider Manpower Inc. placed more than four million people into permanent, temporary and contract positions in a range of industries, including IT, accounting and engineering. But it could be said that one of its most important recruitment initiatives was an internal one, which brought Dan Greer on board to help oversee a dramatic cultural shift in the way Manpower’s IT organization operated across some 4,300 offices in 72 countries.
Greer joined Manpower in 2003, soon after newly appointed CIO Rick Davidson had arrived with the vision of “governing globally, executing locally,” based on a business philosophy of leveraging global efficiencies, while encouraging local entrepreneurship and innovation. At the time, the recruitment and training specialist employed a decentralized IT model, with each country running its own IT shop its own way, for the most part blissfully ignorant of each other’s efforts. Davidson tabbed Greer, who had experience as an IT governance consultant for Fortune 500 …
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