News

• 23.01.2012: Call for participation Evaluation phase of D-Move - a detailed process model for large scale data migration projects
• 13.05.2011: The technical report Towards an integrated data migration process model - State of the art & literature overview has been released
• 08.12.2010: The article M&A driven IT transformation - Empirical findings from a series of expert interviews in the German banking industry has been accepted at WI 2011
  

• 22.10.2010: Best-paper award for the article A method for consolidating application landscapes during the post-merger-integration phase

• 17.08.2010: The article A method for consolidating application landscapes during the post-merger-integration phase has been accepted for publication at IMCSIT 2010. In the article the author team (Andreas Freitag, Florian Matthes, and Christopher Schulz) present a method how two independly evolved applications landscapes can be consolidated by leveraging the EA framework TOGAF.

• 16.04.2010: The report report IT Transformation in the Context of Mergers & Acquistions has been published. 

Summary

In recent times, the yearly number of Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) increases steadily. Especially in saturated markets, another wave of consolitation can be observed, likely to be catalyzed by the financial crisis.

M&A are mainly driven by business goals like, e.g.:

• Improve enterprise’s competiveness
• Enter new markets and/or increase market penetration
• Offer new products and introduce new distribution channels
• Improve cost efficiency
• Access strategic resources or knowledge

A significant number of merger projects do not reach their expected goals or fail completely. Still, recent empirical studies indicate continuing low success rates. IT plays a major role in the Post-Merger Integration (PMI) but is often underrepresented in the merger planning phase leading to problems whilst the transformation. Scientific literature states specific success factors for a merger (for example: a clear business vision, coordinated and holistic planning of business and IT, consistent decisions, stakeholder management) which we aim to adress with an Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) approach.

Therefore, we aim to combine methods and knowledge from academia (e.g.  EAM Pattern Catalog) with market standards (e.g. TOGAF) and practical experiences from EAM projects.

Objective

The aim of the M&A research project is the collection and academic refinement of practical experiences in large IT transformation projects.

Therefore, we intend to facilitate the cross-enterprise knowledge exchange between EAM and M&A experts. We expect to gain valuable insights by combining state of the art in practice and academia to explore an interesting use case for Enterprise Architecture Management.

Research questions

• What are the typical transformation steps during a merger and what are their key characteristics (dependencies, costs, risks, etc.)?
• How to develop and continually manage the merger roadmap?
• How may a capability map be applied within an ongoing merger project?
• What are suitable abstractions to compare two application landscapes?
• What are helpful indicators & metrics to characterize application landscape elements?
• How could M&A projects benefit from domain-specific reference models of the finance industry (capabilities, processes, information, applications)?
• ...

Publications and results (in reverse chronological order)