M&A Information Technology Best Practices

Chapter 6

IT Infrastructure Aspects of Mergers, Acquisitions, and Divestitures

Rick KupcunasMike TriskoJeffry SprengelMushtaque Heera

In many cases, when an organization is going through a merger, acquisition, or divestiture, the IT infrastructure will go through significant and rapid transformation. (Note: The IT infrastructure generally consists of hardware, networks, data center, and phone services. See the upcoming list for more component examples.) Several services the IT infrastructure supports will be high priorities for integration and/or separation by the time the transaction closes. A large number of synergies can often be quickly gained by combining, consolidating, and streamlining IT infrastructure assets and services.

The rapid transformation brought about by the transaction can be challenging for many organizations. For divestiture transactions, is also common for the IT infrastructure area to have one of the largest numbers of transition services agreements (TSAs) because of long lead times to fully transition and separate all of the IT infrastructure services. (See Chapters 14 and 16 for additional information on TSAs.) One of the contributing factors to this is the large number of dependencies among IT infrastructure, other IT functions, and each of the business functions.

IT Infrastructure Blueprinting

The first order of business when preparing for a merger, acquisition, or divestiture is to gather an inventory of all of the IT infrastructure components that are ...