M&A Validate

Ensure the safety and success of your merger or acquisition with our comprehensive risk assessment and strategic guidance.

MAC Group
M&A Validate

According to Forbes, M&A volume in 2021 was the highest on record — not only in the number of deals but in the dollar value per deal. And, nearly every business is currently managing more technology than at any previous point in its history. According to Spiceworks Ziff Davis, 88 percent of companies planned to either increase or maintain their technology spending in 2022.

With technology being a foundation of modern organizations, and mergers and acquisitions expected to grow in the years ahead, the impact enterprise architecture plays in ensuring post-merger integration activities run smoothly has become readily apparent to business leadership. As a discipline, enterprise architecture (EA) is equally dedicated to the worlds of IT and business. EA’s goals are to offer a holistic overview of an enterprise, one with every business capability mapped alongside its underpinning technologies, to lead rather than merely guide strategic transformations.

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Ways intigrating IT environments can ruin your business.

Lack of Visibility

This is the most fundamental of all the challenges that can arise during a technology integration. Without visibility into the entire technology ecosystem, IT teams cannot effectively plan, execute, and monitor the integration of multiple IT environments.

Without sufficient visibility, IT teams are effectively making guesses instead of informed decisions throughout an integration. From blending the two tech stacks to making hardware integration decisions, without visibility into performance, usage, and employee experience across both environments, IT risks a failed integration. If your enterprise is embarking on an M&A process, it is imperative you have the right visibility tools in place to prepare and execute an integration successfully.

Applications & Licensing

When two or more businesses merge, decisions need to be made regarding unifying their tech stacks and data environments. This process often plays a crucial part in supporting the business goals sought by a merger or acquisition. It is often exceptionally time-consuming and expensive due to the over-provisioning of software licenses and overall poor planning and scheduling. Over- or under-provisioning software licenses can hinder productivity and bloat IT expenses while limiting business output. IT teams need to merge environments in a way that is least disruptive to employee productivity, experience, and the business overall. IT teams need the capability to make informed decisions that will set up employees and the business for success, with the right tools and licenses in place, and the best operational and cost efficiencies identified.

Hardware

Hardware integrations can be equally challenging, despite often being overlooked during the merger and acquisition process.

It takes time to standardize hardware across a large, recently merged enterprise. And all the while, the business must keep running and employees must remain productive. It is also imperative that IT has visibility into the performance of every endpoint. IT teams must be ready to monitor and respond to issues and irregularities from this new hardware landscape without huge spikes in MTTR. Tools that offer real-time telemetry, diagnostics, and remediations can maintain this level of service – and even improve it – but without this, IT is sure to leave employees struggling in silence, and business leaders wondering why productivity is down.

Security & Compliance

Two or more IT environments at the enterprise level are almost guaranteed to have different standards and practices for security and compliance. Bringing those two into alignment is undoubtedly one of the top priorities of IT during a merger or acquisition. However, there are risks involved in the process, especially without visibility into employee / user behavior.

Shadow IT, bad data privacy practices, and outdated security protocols all represent a threat to the enterprise. Without visibility, IT is working in the dark, and may miss key vulnerabilities in the system. Bringing the entire environment up to the highest security and compliance standards is vital to the success of mergers and acquisitions, and to do this efficiently, IT must have full, 360-degree visibility to identify, diagnose, and fix any issues as they arise.

Unrealistic Expectations

Another challenge IT teams, mainly leaders, need to anticipate when planning for a merger or acquisition is surprisingly not a technological challenge but a human challenge: managing expectations. Pressure can often be placed on IT teams to integrate disparate environments as quickly as possible. But moving too fast can end up being as costly as moving too slow.

It is important to get the right tools to be able to effectively plan and monitor every aspect of a technology integration from start to finish, or you could possibly risk burn out across IT teams as well as the larger employee base.

Our Methodology

Mergers and acquisitions are enormous undertakings with countless moving parts, but a few overarching priorities stand above the rest. As they approach potential M&As, organizations should focus on these four key steps:

Develop a joint business capability map based on the corporate strategy

A core principle of enterprise architecture is understanding the baseline capabilities of a business, what an organization needs in order to perform its core functions. Business capability models must be built for each organization, and then combined to derive a joint business capability map.

Create full transparency of the new application landscape

Applications are the backbone of business capabilities. In this step, enterprise architects must create a 360-degree view of all applications to complete the picture of the current-state architecture.

After the information is centralized, EAs should analyze each application by their usage and cost metrics to have an even clearer picture. Business stakeholders should be brought into the fold via application evaluation surveys that evaluate the technical and functional fit of software running in the ecosystem.

Define the best way forward for each application

The time has come to determine how to merge the application landscape and create a target architecture. Teams must align to decide on the best course of action that most closely fits the corporate strategy — e.g., taking a “best of both worlds” vs. “align on major platforms” vs “winner takes all” approach.

It is at this point that a decision must be made with regard to the fate of existing applications. Application rationalization should be completed in stages, with a focused scope on what will yield the best results, for the most vital capabilities.

Develop application roadmap and track implementation

Rationalization activities are underway and EAs should begin tracking the burndown of the application portfolio. They are now responsible for executing the post-merger integration. This can be accomplished by examining the IT landscape at any point in time, past, present, or future, and observing changes.