Blog The Challenge of Change: M&As and Divestitures in the Real World

Constant change brings challenges when it comes to your technology, people and processes. Here are some scenarios of real businesses amid change and what they did to simplify integration and separation — while mitigating tech debt build-up in their environment.

Real-world story #1: Prioritizing security and reliability

We’ve seen many companies strategically choose to divest from a parent company that’s holding them back from modernization. For this organization, their parent company was failing to meet industry standards for security and reliability — a critical priority as the threat of data breaches were becoming greater by the day.

What they prioritized:

• An in-depth current state assessment and environment discovery
• Training of the team around infrastructure technologies and options
• Application dependency mapping and migration of workloads
• Two new data centers built out at colocation facilities, complete with Managed Services

In the midst of this change, the business improved scalability at its new, more modern data centers, and realized greater speed and responsiveness with Flash storage. They also improved business continuity with advanced data protection and backup and enabled their team to regularly test their incident response plans through round table exercises with our team’s up to date threat knowledge.

Real-world story #2: Overcoming data fragmentation

Fractured data and inconsistent reporting processes are commonplace without any M&A or divestiture activity. For one of our clients (a national restaurant chain) a divestiture left the business with even murkier visibility and messier processes. So they used the change as a launchpad to finally build a single source of truth.

What they prioritized:

• Strategy for a second phase data migration
• Construction of a data ingestion pipeline
• Scalable data architecture
• Foundation for ongoing data transformation
• Training for the client's IT team

The new data environment led to major improvements in analytics, providing unmatched insights into important financial and customer metrics — from guest wait times to food preparation times, incident reports and overall sales. It also prepared the way for integration with online ordering and delivery services.

And by replacing the outdated approach to database storage with a more flexible, scalable

data architecture and consolidating resources, the client reduced operational costs by more than $13,000 per month.

Real-world story #3: Building a new standard for the modern workplace

When separating their IT organization from their parent company, Cub Foods needed an end-to-end strategy for migration, adoption and change management.

What they prioritized:

• Assessment of initial environment
• Blueprint and a roadmap for transformation
• Adoption of Microsoft 365, Microsoft Active Directory and Microsoft Intune
• Managed O365 and Managed Service Desk

Cub Foods has since improved the way employees work across the entire business. The upgrade enabled more real-time teamwork among internal groups, and the change made it easier to share and control versions of documents. And, the SSO implementation means that future apps will be ready to use right away (instead of requiring development time for identity management). The support and managed services transferred ongoing management tasks, which freed up Cub’s small IT team to focus on their continued transformation.

Real-world story #4: Modernizing legacy systems

After a long history of acquiring 900+ hospitals across the U.S., this veterinary health firm had many legacy systems that they needed to modernize. To modernize its network services, the client wanted to upgrade infrastructure across hundreds of sites. The project aimed to support a new internet-based phone system and a web app that was coming soon for the hospital branches — which required a stronger network infrastructure to operate on.

What they prioritized:

• Best-practices network state; removing aging hardware
• Infrastructure modernization
• Architecture design, implementation and oversight
• Consolidated IT management

This modernization project resulted in improved performance of our client’s

infrastructure and systems, allowing the pet health firm more freedom to innovate in the future. Consolidated IT management from Insight streamlined and addressed localized IT needs. As the organization moves away from acquisitions and toward building its own locations, it anticipates the need for modern systems work in the future.

A checklist: Top considerations during M&A

In each of these snapshot stories, the drivers might be different, but the goal is the same: To keep the organization focused, organized, protected, and moving as a unified entity toward a singular target.

We’ve found that this checklist is a great high-level starting point that helps businesses account for all the moving parts of M&A and divestiture activity.

• Comprehensive discovery to understand the assets, dependencies, and criticalities within the IT environments
• Workload alignment and application rationalization exercises that prioritize business requirements
• Opportunities for modernization and consolidation that would support overall business objectives
• Compliance requirements and sensitive data being relocated for risk tolerance, security, and governance — existing and future outlook
• Maintenance and management of prospective infrastructure and systems
• Business processes and integrations or modifications that will need to be made
• Cultural adjustments that can be smoothed with effective organizational change management
• The need for business continuity taking the challenges into account with large-scale migrations
• Consistent feedback and industry best-practices aligning cost, skillsets and security considerations through whiteboarding and sharing of industry standards

More resources for you

To position for success, navigate change and tackle your tech debt, check out these additional resources:

• Infographic: Extinguishing Tech Debt From Your Environment
• eBook: Guide to Tech Debt: Management Strategies to Accelerate Innovation
• Video: Mergers & Acquisitions: Managing the Difficulties of Technical Debt
• LinkedIn Live: The Art of M&A: Strategies for a Smooth Transition

Conquer your most complex change initiatives. With deep expertise across the entire technology ecosystem, you can trust Insight to help you navigate change strategically.