Your company has just acquired a new business. The deal is official, and it is necessary to start integrating the user IT infrastructure.
Same as described in the post for Divestitures, your company will most likely set up a program. The integration will be designed and implemented by a central team taking care of the global topics but also by the local IT organizations that will execute all on-site actions.
The focus during an integration should be on following aspects:
1. Assessment of acquired assets and ongoing contracts.
During the deal and the negotiation of the Transitional Service Agreement (TSA), you’ll want to clarify which IT assets are included in the sale (HW and SW licenses) and how you are going to proceed with ongoing contracts.
2. Ensure business continuity
Your company acquired a working business, and you want this to continue; therefore, you need to make sure that you sign a TSA that guarantees that the divesting company will take care of your new users until you are ready to take over this responsibility.
With the TSA ensuring business continuity, you need to identify all critical assets and requirements and prepare your organization to provide them. These requirements include at least following topics: Hardware, shared and personal data, Applications, e-mail history, mailboxes, networks (WAN, LAN, VLAN, WLAN), printing services, telephony, etc.
3. Communication
During a divestiture or acquisition, the users experience many changes. Obviously, they get a new email address, they probably lose some of their oldest emails, and they have to adapt to the standards of the buyer in hardware, software, and user support.
It is recommendable that the buying company takes care of the communication and the training of the users. Not only that it does make more sense from the practical point of view, but it is also kinder to welcome the new users rather than saying good bye to the leaving party.
Usually, there is a separate project stream dealing with training and communication, but they need the input from the other project team members to know when to launch which message and to whom.
4. Implement standards
The IT landscape from both companies might be quite different to each other, but, in the end, with few exceptions, the prevailing standards are the ones from the buyer. It is part of the project to identify the differences and deal with them.
It is recommendable to use as many existing processes as possible for the onboarding of the new users.
5. Hand over to operational teams.
As soon as possible it is necessary to moderate the conversations between the local IT of the selling and the buying company because usually purchase orders or other arrangements take place on site.
In the end, the global team’s task is to perform all bulk global actions and enable the local IT, and all other support and operational teams to integrate the new users smoothly.