I work at a large company that has testing function in each geography, while the HQ is in the US (part of this is managing virtual teams).  The research I'm looking into is whether or not it is beneficial to create a centralized testing team (separate from QM/QA - this testing is completed by the cross-funtional business end-users) at the HQ that would provide status updates/metrics to the cross-funtional business end-users.