As the global economy improves and investor confidence stabilizes, global merger and acquisition (M&A) activity is likely to improve. Because technology has become so pervasive, IT departments have a significant impact on the success or failure of these deals.
An article in the Wall Street Journal, “Four Mistakes Companies Make in Mergers—and How to Avoid Them,” states that integrating IT systems is the bane of all deals. In fact, one of the big four mistakes is that integration mistakes can be killers.
During a merger and acquisition integration, CIOs are responsible for continuing day-to-day business functions for employees as well as combining the IT departments that provide company functions such as HR, finance and operations. While many companies may merge due to synergies, it is often discovered from an IT perspective that there is also the challenge of rationalizing total IT resources often with the goal of reducing cost.
While mergers and acquisitions are not new, what may seem as a simple task of taking stock of the inventory of both companies is not short of a monumental task for IT. The task is not about simple rationalizing of hardware and software, but determining new standard applications for deployments, sorting software licenses, potential audits, procurement processes, planning for hardware real estate, securing the environment from cyber threats, and more.