Most companies rely on technology vendors to provide the tools and solutions needed to enhance business processes, improve customer service and streamline data sharing among disparate sources within the organization. However, technology companies face the same integration and data management challenges that their customers face – removing silos, improving data sharing and positioning their IT services to support the organization’s growth.
These challenges are exacerbated when business growth occurs as a result of a merger or acquisition. As difficult as integrating a myriad of applications used by different business groups in one organization can be, mergers double the infrastructure and amount of data the new organization must manage.
Proper planning for post-merger acquisition includes:
- Inventory all applications used by the acquired organization
- Don’t forget to include shadow IT in this inventory because it is an issue for all organizations. In fact, a global study of 200 CIOs found that 83 percent experienced some level of unauthorized provisioning of cloud services.
- Identify redundant systems
- It will be necessary to move all data to one system while correcting inconsistencies and removing inaccurate data before retiring the redundant system to avoid managing a bloated infrastructure.
- Ensure that data is accessible for all business units in the new organization
- In most cases, it is unrealistic and fiscally unsound to create a completely new IT infrastructure for the new organization immediately post-merger, so it is important to find solutions that provide accurate mapping tools to support use of data from all applications in as seamless as manner as possible.
Although the acquiring organization may want to prioritize the use of technology that it has used to build the business, keep an open mind as existing technology in both organizations is evaluated.
In a real world example, the merger of two technology companies introduced one company to a Mapping Center of Excellence that was created by the company it was acquiring. Designed to streamline internal and business-to-business data transfer, a canonical data model and platform independence supported the transformation of any type of data from any type of source. Automating the process of managing mapping configurations provided an added level of quality control – ensuring that the transformation is configured correctly, and consistently validated against desired specifications.
Because the acquired company had experienced such success with the Mapping Center of Excellence’s technology, it was adopted for use in the new organization – initially focusing on specific integration goals and expanding to uses in a variety of business units.
OpenText™ Contivo™ was the technology tool of choice for the Mapping Center of Excellence for the integration of two technology leaders, but it provides the same benefits to companies in all industries – a seamless, automated, platform independent approach that ensures cost-effective, accurate integration of disparate applications and systems.
Data mapping can be a tedious, costly process with a high risk of human error, but selecting a data-driven, automation-based tool can streamline the process and support a successful integration of two companies or enable different business units using different applications to share data in one company.
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