By Teresa Meek
Mergers may be terrific when viewed from the heights of the C-suite, but to employees, they can be scary and confusing. For the IT department, they have less to do with profitable new business lines than with figuring out how to integrate all the new employee and company data that will come flooding in on top of what’s already there.
There’s no question that mergers and acquisitions are hot—deal volume is over $2 trillion this year, up 67 percent over last year’s, with another quarter still ahead.
“It’s not rare for companies to have a hundred companies inside them,” says Uri Sarid, CTO of MuleSoft, a software company that provides a platform to connect enterprise and other applications. That means it takes careful planning and judicious use of technology to keep operations running smoothly and make the transition more seamless.
IT at Work
As HR and managers work on implementing a cultural integration plan, the IT department has its hands full integrating employee-related hardware and software.
IT will typically examine the hardware, software and platforms of the new company to find commonalities and differences, then decide which systems need to be integrated first. To minimize disruption and gain cooperation, it’s often useful to integrate information related to payroll, benefits and the employee directory from the beginning, Sarid says. Then it can either use point-to-point coding to integrate the two companies’ systems or write APIs on top of a single platform.
Point-to-point custom coding, which involves having systems integrators rewrite code for conflicting systems to make them work as one, is the traditional method, and businesses collectively spend $500 billion a year on point-to-point coding, according to MuleSoft.
Creating APIs that run on top of both companies’ systems and send integrated data to users doesn’t integrate the two databases, but searches both and returns consolidated results. It can work with data center mainframes, previous API architectures, cloud-based SaaS systems such as Salesforce.com, or private clouds.
Cloud solutions can play a key role in helping integrate multiple systems. Such solutions can expedite integration and deployment, cutting the process down from weeks to a matter of days. They can be designed to offer all the required hardware and software components, and can even help modernize older infrastructures.
Although much of the hype around cloud solutions often focuses on large enterprises, small and midsize businesses may actually be able to move faster to adopt cloud technology. Midsize businesses are more likely to fully embrace the cloud than larger organizations, according to a 2014 survey by software maker Rightscale. One reason may be the burden of integrating, or overcoming, legacy IT systems at big firms: More than half of chief information officers told NTT Communications in 2013 that the complexity of existing IT was a barrier to cloud adoption. That implies smaller firms can snowball their investments in the cloud, moving faster to reap greater rewards as they create more flexible organizations and business processes for employees to leverage.
Regardless of how systems are being integrated, it’s important to conserve some IT resources for employee support and new projects. If everyone in IT is too busy working on integration to help employees or create systems for new business lines, people will begin to question whether the merger was worth the trouble.
Plugging in to Solutions
To help employees adjust, a company needs to understand the needs of workers it wants to retain while achieving its business objectives, says Matthew Cook, senior director of workspace at Forsythe Technology, which helps companies deal with mergers and acquisitions.
The work habits and technology used by employees on both sides should be studied, as they’re likely to differ across job functions. The acquiring company must not fall into the trap of adopting “one-size-fits-all” platforms or applications. Even if only 15 percent of employees use a technology, if it is taken away from them, they may feel alienated. And, if they’re high performers, that could be a serious problem.
“It’s all about making it a personal experience,” says Fred Latala, vice president of data center solutions at Forsythe. Even when employees use a common platform, they should be able to customize it, he says.
Of course, the ideal situation would be for an enterprise’s multitude of applications to play in the same sandbox, but that can be a challenge. “Application sprawl” is widespread—most companies are only aware of about half the applications their employees use, Cook says. Technology solutions to integrate apps are on the way, but in the meantime, platforms like Salesforce—and to some extent, Jive and Box—let employees get to know one another, share ideas and collaborate on content.
Teresa Meek is a Seattle-based freelance journalist, writer, and editor whose work has appeared in Newsday, the Miami Herald, the St. Petersburg Times, the Baltimore Sun, and other newspapers and magazines.
