Reality IT: Group Therapy Can Cure Mergermania

Learning SpanISh

Mergers were nothing new to me, so I knew the drill. Our first step was to do some "due diligence" (don't you love it when I lay on the business talk?) to check out the technology of the target firm. One of my priorities would be to assess the apprehension level of the IT staffers--how nervous were they about the future of their jobs? My peer at SpanISh was Isabella Ferdinand, who had been its IT director for several years.

I met Isabella when I joined a team of ACME managers that descended on remotely located SpanISh like a band of marauders. There had been rumblings that SpanISh management might not cooperate, but that didn't prove to be the case in the IT group.

ACME planners had asked SpanISh senior management to keep the acquisition quiet, but Isabella and her top staffers had, of course, already heard about it well before through the company rumor mill. In fact, they were relieved to meet someone from ACME in person. Still feeling a bit like an intruder, I informed them our task was to jointly plan the migration of the SpanISh IT applications--e-mail, accounting, human resources, customer-relationship management, inventory and so forth--over to the ACME IT environment. I also assured the SpanISh IT staffers that we needed to keep them all. They sighed with relief.

To succeed, the two IT staffs would have to work together at every level. We would need to plan and execute in several phases, with specific milestones. Isabella and I appointed a lead project manager at each company; both would report to her during the transition, and ultimately, to me.I was worried about the two teams developing an us-versus-them attitude, so I made a point to send ACME senior IT folks to SpanISh offices and bring some of SpanISh's IT staff to our location. Each visit lasted several days and included time for the peers to get to know one another technically, professionally and personally. Happily, I could almost see the angst level of the SpanISh folks decrease as they worked with the ACME staff to advance the project toward completion.

The Right Moves

Overall, the SpanISh acquisition went very well, both from a business and an IT perspective. Looking back, there were several things we did right. The first was getting the funds to exchange visits between the two IT departments. In addition, we were lucky that top management gave us plenty of time and autonomy to plan and plot the systems migration and conversion. We also managed to wrangle funding from the acquisition project to make some much-needed technology upgrades, which made everybody happy. We kept Isabella on as a deputy IT director with supervisory responsibility at the SpanISh site.

Today, we see the SpanISh staffers as key players on our IT team, despite their geographical distance, and we look forward to more successes together.

Hunter Metatek is an enterprise IT director with 15 years' experience in network engineering and management. The events chronicled in this column are based in fact--only the names are fiction. Write to the author at [email protected].0