Is the CIO’s involvement critical to the success of an acquisition?
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In New Zealand, we've seen a lot of mergers and acquisitions over the last 12 to 18 months. I've seen mergers go well where the technology side was dealt with appropriately. In those cases, the merger was for a specific piece of technology or for a book of customers, so there was a lot of due diligence around that. But I've also seen it done poorly, where a company that acquired through growth and never did the due diligence ended up with four Office 365 tenants and data spread from here to Africa as a result. When we had to unpick them, it cost tens of thousands of US dollars just to get them into a single tenant to reduce overheads.
The CIO doesn't have all the data. In a lot of ways, the CIO may manage the bits on the disc, but they don't necessarily own or know where all of the material data is. The success of an acquisition is a bigger question that goes beyond the CIO. The CIO can be the facilitator who brings the right people together, but I wouldn't expect all of the pieces to rest at their feet.
Regardless of your role in the company, your ability as an executive to create what could be considered invisible integrations has enormous value. That ability only goes unappreciated in companies that don't do acquisitions, because it is a huge pain when you do it wrong.