IT Strategy to facilitate Business Integration

The organization's IT services can be viewed as a composition of the following key elements:

To integrate the business in a most effective way an organization needs to develop an IT strategy that would navigate all three elements transformation:

An IT strategy, in its turn, is one of the key functional strategies of an organization:

To sum up, the post-merger business integration should be grounded with well elaborated strategy that, among other components, includes the IT strategy which translates the business requirements into the development plans for IT organization, business apps, and IT infrastructure of the entire organization.

Microsoft Dynamics AX can be used as a flexible integration platform and core ERP component of the Business Applications layer in the organization's IT services:

© Andrey Maslov

Post-merger business integration and how business solutions can help

As many companies have become much cheaper in the current economic situation and their respective markets squeezed, the volume of M&A transactions is expected to grow accross various industries.

And as always in most of M&A transactions, the post-closing business integration is the key success factor that defines if the companies would succeed in realizing expected sinergies from the deal.
The business solutions play a critical role in post-merger business integration helping streamline and establish visibility into business processes, capitalize on shared information, and empower decision makers with the tools to cope with the new scale of business operations.

The business solutions in merging companies can be of different nature:

The question is how to integrate them in a most effective way. Of course, it heavily depends on the chosen business strategy: is it planned to completely reorganize and recombine business functions of merged companies to establish new headquarters, shared services centers, and geographical divisions? or to include acquired entities into the company's supply chain in case of vertical integration? There is a broad variety of cases with specific goals being pursued.

It is important to develop the relevant IT strategy and Enterprise Architecture that will provide the road map for solution integration and transformation in 'post-merger life'.

From technical perspective, there is a number of technologies commonly used for application integration:

• Database access technologies
• Message-oriented middleware
• Remote procedure calls
• Transaction processing monitors
• Object request brokers
• Application servers
• Web services
• Enterprise service buses
• Several hybrid and proprietary products

In the next post I'll focus on Microsoft Dynamics AX capabilities for integration.

© Andrey Maslov