There is a high probability that if your organisation becomes
successful it will be the target of a merger or acquisition or perhaps acquire another company itself. When this occurs, the impact on DR planning can be dramatic. To avoid potential business losses, you must adjust your plan as soon as possible to handle the changes incurred by successful mergers or acquisitions.There are two potential scenarios in this situation. The first is if your firm is the dominant partner in the merger or acquisition — this gives you control over the IT merger process and an advantage in political and business decisions. Of course if your firm is acquired you may find yourself in the reverse situation, where you must take your lead from the dominant market partner and deal with potential pitfalls.
If your company controls the process IT planning for the new firm is easier in most cases, but certainly not a piece of cake. While your firm can mandate the procedures to be used, there's no guarantee that the other firm will have compatible data-systems, hardware, software or anything else. This could mean that they will be completely incapable of following your company's lead when it comes to DR planning, at least at the beginning of the process. You may be able to put political and economic pressure on the new firm, which can help to bring them in line with your company's overall DR plan. However, you may need to take into account that some things can't be changed — that will mean training your staff on the new technology and training the new staff from the merger partner on your existing technology. While this process will be time consuming it may be unavoidable, especially if the other company has standardised on a completely different technology set (such as a different OS or incompatible hardware platform).
If you're not the controlling company in the merger process you will have to face the flipside of the scenario just discussed. It will be up to your company to attempt to either adapt to the technology base of the dominant partner, justify why the new firm needs to let you keep the exisiting or possibly even take some of that technology into their own shop. If systems are compatible and the other partner's technology base is better than yours from a DR perspective, you should be open to accepting the new technology into your own organisation. However, if they are not well-prepared for DR or have technology that is simply incompatible with your solution set, you may need to be ready to assert all the pressure possible to make sure you don't get forced backwards with your own DR plans. If the dominant partner's DR plan does not comply with regulatory requirements, leaves your data open to potential losses or does anything else that could endanger your systems, those issues should be well documented and used as ammunition to increase your case to the top decision-makers.
Mergers and acquisitions are never easy. Melding together two companies is hard enough from a business perspective and it doesn't get any less complex from a technology perspective. Being ready for what's coming up, analysing your environment and that of the new partner and knowing how to state your case clearly and emphatically can keep you from getting the short end of the DR stick, no matter which side of the business case you're on.
