Rail travelers arriving at the Indian city of Mumbai -- formerly Bombay -- are rewarded by an early example of technological imperialism: Victoria Terminus. A pile of gray stone standing five stories high, it was decorated under the auspices of the father of Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book and other tales from the era of the British Raj. Vast, dark and full of echoes, it looks more like a monument than a station. On hot days -- and there aren't many other kinds in Mumbai -- it captures, traps and bakes the mixed smells of smoke, dust, body odor and garbage. It's a grand building, a very English building, and one that screams, "We own you, and you'll do things our way, practical or not."

Does anybody realize that technological imperialism didn't go away with the Empire? Take globalization. "Great idea," says the average CIO. "Let's get some consistency and bring our overseas partners up to speed." And every time I hear a CIO say it, I can see another Victoria Terminus going up -- a big, expensive pile that might have worked well in the builder's climate and economy but is simply absurd where it's supposed to go.

Examples? Well, in that same city of Mumbai, a textile company I've come to know well had to use an American ERP system to record sales orders for their rolls of cloth. The trouble was that they needed to maintain two prices for the same bolt of cloth: the export price and the domestic price. The ERP company's reaction was: "Why would you want to do that?" Trust me, they had a perfectly good reason.

The trouble was that in America, it's illegal to charge a different base price to two different classes of users. And by gosh, said the American software programmers, do things the American way or be off with you.

Did the CIO who initiated that globalization project have any idea what he was doing? I happen to know that he thought he was bringing in "advanced" technology. But that technology wasn't advanced. It was a technology that worked well (some of the time) in the parent company's economic system. In reality, he wasn't bringing the rest of the world "up to speed" -- he was slowing the rest of the world down.

It's a common blunder: Few people realize how deeply local assumptions are built in to business software.

Another Indian company was trying to put in an American distribution resource planning system that assumed a reliable connection between buyer and seller. The connection was needed because the supply site had to accept orders before confirming them. It's a good idea in an economic system where you have multiple supply sites and good connectivity.

It's less of a smart idea in India, where connectivity is not good -- least of all during the monsoon. Do you know how they got the orders to the supply site? They put them on a diskette

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