Post-Merger IT integration

Many mergers and acquisitions fail to achieve their objectives. Literature indicates failure rates between 50% and 80%. The issues include the integration of personnel, business processes and IT. Organizations tend to underestimate the impact of the IT integration but it is one of the most critical challenges companies face during the M&A. This research is focused on addressing this problem by identifying the critical success factors, from literature and practice, which affect the IT integration success in an M&A context and developing a framework based on measures from practice. This framework can serve as a systematic approach for an organization to increase efficiency during IT integration after an M&A and achieve higher success rates. Literature reveals that a successful IT integration during an M&A, starts already during the premerger phase. Studies indicate that involving IT in the due diligence increases the value from the M&A and resulting in a more successful experience. Once the deal is closed IT integration preparation steps can be taken. IT strategy, project management and managing IT personnel are vital success factors for the realization of M&A benefits at this stage in the process. The literature research also reveals that the actual IT integration project success depends heavily on the accuracy execution of the actions defined in the previous M&A phases. These critical success factors from literature are used as baseline for the research. Through empirical research the CSF list from literature is validated and completed by conducting expert interviews. During the semi structured interviews the respondents only recognized a limited set of CSF’s as critical for the IT integration success. Due to the limited population participating in the interviews, no additional CSF’s could be added to the CSF baseline. For every validated and recognized CSF, measures implemented in practice were checked. These measures are agreed across the participants and will be used, together with their corresponding CSF, as foundation for the development of a systematic IT integration approach. This framework is intended to consist out of practical measures that can be used during management of the IT integration after an M&A. Further research can test this framework through application in practice and validate if it leads to a successful IT integration. Another recommendation can be to add an additional parameter to the research : “IT integration method”. According to Harrell and Higgins (2002), there are four IT integration methods: replacing the complete IT by a new IT, take-over the IT from one of the partners, combining the best parts of both IT’s as new standard or keep IT from both companies coexisting. This parameter was mentioned several times during the semi-structured interviews and interesting to further investigate. The desired IT integration level could be very valuable in the refining of the framework