Tuesday, February 26, 2008 9:50 PM
jhinkle
Acquisitions
The primary way that my company grows is through acquisition. It is rather typical of manufacturing, as building facilities costs money, then customers have to be found to fill the new capacity. From an IT perspective, it leaves an interesting question: how far does the integration effort go?
I've been through a major acquisition and several minor ones. In all cases, we did a rip and replace, spreading our systems throughout the new locations. This has afforded us a great deal of flexibility in IT over the years, since we're keeping things standardized. Supporting 5000 users isn't a lot different from supporting 2000, except for the scale.
What if that isn't the case? I'd love to hear some of your stories about integrating disparate systems and what struggles or triumphs were part of the process.
Filed under: Management