Name
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
Today mergers of larger financial institutions are quite common place. You often find conglomerates that stem from a sequence of merger & acquisition activities. In each such case, IT management is confronted with more than one set of applications, often more than one IT service organization and the question is how to deal with such a situation. Typically management likes to reduce cost by migrating to just one application landscape and one IT service organization. This article describes a few observations and patterns how these challenges can be dealt with. The Challenge - Merging IT Services Mergers are very common place in the world of financial institutions today. Large companies are buying smaller ones or companies of similar size merge. After each merger the management typically finds at least two IT application landscapes that do similar things, serve a very similar business and cause significant maintenance costs. They find at least two data centers, two service organizations for WANs, LANs and PCs, two organizations for running ERP software and at least two portfolios of tailor made application software for the core business of the two or more companies. Often it is a driving force behind such mergers to raise all kinds of synergies that justify the merger or acquisition from an economical viewpoint. A subtype of such synergies are typically potential economies of scale in IT services. This article deals with observations how to best handle the merging of IT operations. We use insurance as the running example. Examples have been made anonymous. The observations and patterns might also be valid in other industries. A longer version of the paper, discussing all the influence factors in depth and listing cases could be provided but would exceed the paper format of the workshop this paper has been prepared for. The paper will refer to two types of examples. The term conglomerates is used for groups or holdings who own e.g. 5+ insurance companies, all in a very similar business. The term merger is used if we have two companies in the same business, who have merged and are now one legal entity. We will see that there might be implications from whether we have to do with a "merger of equals" or with a takeover. In practice there are almost arbitrary forms of merger-formed companies, as e.g. a conglomerate can be |
Year | Venue | Keywords |
|---|---|---|
2004 | GI-Jahrestagung | economies of scale,it management,data center |
Field | DocType | Citations |
Information technology operations,Insurance industry,Core business,Software,Information technology management,Finance,Application software,Industrial organization,Merge (version control),Economies of scale,Business | Conference | 4 |
PageRank | References | Authors |
0.72 | 2 | 1 |
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wolfgang Keller | 1 | 19 | 6.90 |