By : Mr. Geeman Yip, Founder & CEO, BitTitan
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, mergers and acquisitions were experiencing a steady rise, and as we move into 2021, business leaders in India and around the globe are anticipating a flurry of M&A activity in response to the changing economy.
That said, companies may find it takes longer to realize their M&A ROI due to mishandled, failed or extended IT integration or merging of operations and technologies – which are critical steps in the M&A process. For smart leaders, this is an opportunity for the acquiring company to realize immediate gains through decreased expenses via consolidation. Unfortunately, merging IT infrastructures is often overlooked or considered an afterthought post-merger due to inadequate planning or execution.
A disjointed or failed IT integration puts business goals at risk, making it critical for leaders to create a plan for a successful integration, especially since technology is now mission-critical to business operations. Missteps can cause needless frustration, adding a layer of complication to an already byzantine process. With proper system analysis and consolidation, enterprises can eliminate redundancies, ensure a smoother process, centralize security practices, prevent data loss and save money.
Successful companies can maximize their combined potential by taking a systematic, disciplined and rigorous approach to merging operations with careful analysis of the synergies of the combined companies, including IT infrastructures. This often means involving IT and operations executives in the due-diligence process, securing their input on existing cost structures and how efficiencies might be realized.
To maximize value and streamline IT, forward-thinking decision-makers should enact the following:
First, make disciplined, strategic decisions about inherent systems and what data and resources to keep and consolidate from supply chains, ERP, payroll, cloud solutions and more. When done properly, these decisions will reduce costs. Well-planned cloud migrations save on average around 15% of IT spending.
As executives consider data integration and critical communications such as email and calendars, they should also bear in mind that there are proven tools, such as BitTitan MigrationWiz, that can streamline the migration process, making it safe, secure and easy. This can help identify and eliminate redundancies, mitigate interruption to end users and ensure a successful overall migration.
Next, the acquiring company should exploit the prospect of engaging in necessary IT housekeeping. Companies accumulate more and more data year over year, since little electronic data is purged regularly, thanks to expanded storage space available across systems. This is data that’s lost relevance, clogging the ability to locate necessary files, or worse, creating a liability during a legal discovery process. Organizations should take advantage of the M&A as a chance to evaluate what should and shouldn’t be migrated. They should also reexamine and update retention policies for different types of data.
Finally, post-merger, IT teams need to govern and monitor the newly deployed solutions. Third-party tools and automation solutions, like BitTitan Voleer, can help with implementation through IT environment assessments, cost analyses, and identifying ways to improve adoption and usage. Having a well-thought-out plan is vital to delivering value while mitigating risk. If the acquiring company has accomplished the first two steps, the final data consolidation and migration should be relatively pain-free.
Since companies rely on IT infrastructure for nearly every aspect of operations, the role of technology in M&A is more crucial than ever. Enterprises that devote the time and planning necessary to ensure seamless integration of IT resources in mergers and acquisitions will be more likely to succeed and achieve their business goals sooner.
