Mergers, acquisitions and other significant changes within companies' Information Systems : From competitive advantage to corporate strategy

Nowadays, the multiplication of environments due to mergers, acquisitions and other significant changes within companies' Information Systems, mandates the implementation of coexistence between different platforms and messaging systems. These projects are multiplying constantly necessitating the need to implement a seamless, transparent transition to effectively lead change without disrupting the business activity or affect competitiveness.

In any fusion between two entities, Change Management not only brings the challenge of taking into consideration the corporate culture particular to each entity, but also requires careful review of the ensuing costs.  Cost control and optimization is a key factor when integrating two or more entities into a common systems environment, particularly as concerns infrastructure and labor expenses.  

Organizational Changes management approaches:

Push through a quick integration: Ask the new entity to adopt tools and practices of the new headquarters, effectively migrating the acquired company to the existing environment of the acquiring entity, can be painful and expensive, causing not only a drop in business productivity, but also considerable training costs.
In the case of a large organization with thousands of users, the training alone requires a significant effort for an internal organization to carry out the transition, making it very attractive to implement a low cost migration mechanism that will ensure coexistence between the two systems during the migration.

Federate the integration: For many reasons, the acquired entity may wish or absolutely need to maintain its independence and thus its environment. In this case it will be necessary to meet this requirement by implementing a tool that allows IT platforms to work together ensuring better end-user efficiency.    

Each user will retain his or her original messaging environment with its familiar interface and can check the agenda of his new colleagues to quickly organize meetings. In this way, it will avoid colossal costs of change management and internal user training.
In conclusion, both approaches may be considered valid; your company's strategic goals in conjunction with your expansion planning will decide the better of the two approaches, or perhaps a combination of both.  Whatever your choice, we have the tools to assist you in achieving your objectives.

Emmanuel Dreux - CEO & CTO Cloudiway