Considerations: Guiding your Enterprise Architecture Contributions to M&A

Looking at business, culture, and digital maturity

Understanding Your EA Contributions to M&A Activities

Each business is different. Your approach to enterprise architecture and M&A depends on a variety of broader considerations, such as:

Are you a B2B or B2C company?
What are the primary business drivers for your M&A deals? For example, are you acquiring to expand market share in your existing market, to gain access to new markets, or to conduct vertical integration?
How much does your organization already embrace activities like application rationalization? “Survival-of-the-fittest” cultures encourage users to actively choose which applications they use. In “planning” cultures, business owners expect an efficient allocation of resources.
How much does the business trust IT? How much business value does IT demonstrate daily? How well do stakeholders understand enterprise architecture? Do you have to call it something else (with less “governance” connotations) to get buy-in?
What is your current EA model: centralized, decentralized, hub-and-spoke, etc.?
What is your appetite for risk and desire to innovate? How do you make tough decisions about strategic platforms (like CRM), even when business units are not aligned?
Which digital assets are the most valuable for you? Is it the application infrastructure, the product management culture, or the people and their skills?

Adapted from “Democratizing Transformation,” Harvard Business Review, May-June 2022