Overview
This global creative and media organisation had the best history of highly successful Mergers and Acquisitions in the creative industries, with almost all Agency owners staying to grow their business for many years after earn-outs were completed.
However, the organisation was transforming to address technology driven change in the industries, especially in the form of AI. Enabling effective and efficient collaboration across the Group through common IT services was now critically important to the success of the company, and so IT needed to take a more prominent and proactive role in M&A, working to support all stages in the lifecycle.
The Challenge
The organisation had acquired a large, fragmented IT landscape through the acquisitions, which in order to fully benefit from the transformation initiatives, needed to be rationalised and simplified. This also necessitated the creation of an IT specific playbook to define the target standards for future mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures.
The playbook would not only guide the potential future integration requirements, but also help evaluate future target acquisitions’ IT capabilities, opportunities, costs and risks.
The Enterprise Architecture (EA) team had been tasked with delivering a playbook to:
- Support the Business Strategy and Investment Thesis that drove any given M&A activity; identifying any risks, issues or costs that need to be accounted for during contractual negotiations and planning
- Protect the company from reputational damage and protect company systems and data from compromise or loss
- Identify opportunities for efficiency or capability improvement through alignment to company standards and leveraging company capabilities
- Enable the company and the acquired business to quickly benefit from the acquisition.
Approach
Such a complex organisation would likely have areas of good and excellent M&A practice contained within it, so we an approach designed to seek out and leverage this practice. Our lead consultant worked closely with the EA team in 4 phases to:
- Discovery & Assessment Phase
- Create relationships with key stakeholders and identify specialists
- Rapidly understood the maturity and tools, techniques in use across the organisation
- Identify and leverage good practice
- Identify key pain points and quick wins
- Strategy & Playbook Design:
- Develop an IT playbook, closely aligned to the Corporate Development M&A playbook
- Develop processes and phases to support local regional and global needs
- Identify key roles, responsibilities
- Develop clear and simple governance and communication processes
- M&A Toolkit:
- Develop a common Technology Due Diligence assessment framework
- Develop M&A governance and review processes
- Develop Integration Architecture standards
- Capability Building
- Work with an Architect throughout the project, as members of one team, to build capability and skills for lasting benefit
- Build new stakeholder connections across the organisation for EA
Outcomes
The playbook was rapidly accepted by key stakeholders as the standard approach for IT involvement in Mergers, Acquisitions, Integrations and Divestitures.
The EA team appointed a permanent team for M&A activities, who have since further developed and refined the playbook for use in all M&A activity.