Mergers & Acquisitions: Managing Integration with Migration

Business Process Transition with IT

Not only will the IT assets themselves transition, but the business processes that rely on those IT assets will need to be managed and maintained throughout the transition.  Endpoints, data, identities, applications, and permissions are not static.  Not only do they change through the transition window, but they are also intermingled and rely on each other to function properly.  An employee will utilize multiple IT assets and systems each day in collaboration with other employees doing the same.  A plan can be implemented by untangling the web of relationships, requirements, limitations, and conflicts to ensure the disparate pieces move together. This plan minimizes the disruption to the existing workforce and regular operations.  It is essential to keep business needs and IT requirements in mind. Examples:

• Source and destination assets, processes, and frameworks differ
• Destination requirements, conflicts, and limitations

In today’s business environment, the volume and interconnectedness between various IT services make traditional pen-and-paper or spreadsheet management tools insufficient to handle the complexity required for successful planning. Due to those increasing needs, customized data-driven solutions that can handle the raw information transition and consider the business and IT processes associated with the workforce that uses that data are becoming increasingly necessary.

Matchmaking 101: Mapping to a New Home

Making sure that there is not only a solid, continually updated inventory of all the assets being acquired but also an equally valid inventory of existing assets in the acquiring company is essential to ensuring a well-orchestrated transition.  Not every asset may be transferred to the acquiring organization, transferred together, or to a similar location in the destination environment.  There are key topics to consider during IT asset mapping during an M&A transition.

Topics for Consideration:

• Source inventory accuracy and completeness
• Destination topology design
• Possible asset dispositions
  • Direct 1:1 to destination environment
  • Move to a greenfield environment
  • Mapping to destination environment
  • Recreation in destination environment
  • Retirement

• Conflicts, collisions, or redundancy among assets
• Comprehensive mapping of source to destination for applicable assets (Metadata is essential to this process)
• Organization SME review of the asset mapping plan

Without a comprehensive plan for every IT asset an acquiring organization will be taking possession of, there is a risk of loss of that asset and associated business downtime due to lost or misplaced assets. A proper map will ensure there is a path for every IT asset to its final destination and that none are lost during the transition.

Creating a Plan to Avoid Broken Business Processes

With any change comes a disconnect between systems and a risk that those systems will break.  Organizations may find themselves in a position where they do not even know where to start on a plan or take on risks moving forward with a partial plan.  This results in broken business processes that are deemed necessary pain points of the migration.  However, by knowing not only the IT assets but, more importantly, the relationship between those assets, a migration can be orchestrated to minimize the impact on business activities.  What data is used by which services that are utilized by which segments of the workforce?

When the execution of the transition for different IT service platforms is timed properly, the proper IT assets can be transitioned in such a way that core business functions continue to operate and any service outage is minimized across duration, impact, and, ultimately, cost.  Coordinating the movement of business processes, IT services, data, and an organization’s users can seem overwhelming. Coming up with the proper tools and knowing how you can save an acquiring organization undue hardship gains in efficiency and downtime.  When designing an integration with the existing system, consider these best practice principles:

• Relationships between assets are just as important as the assets themselves
• Timing is everything
• Coordination is key

If your organization is executing an M&A project and experiencing difficulty integrating IT and business processes between different entities, please reach out to New Era Technology or visit our Deployment Coordination Services page to learn more.