When it comes to evaluating the tech side of things, you will want to look at:

  • Interfaces (the inputs and outputs)
  • Application stack (the architecture, dependencies, infrastructure)
  • Maintenance and support (who and how it will be cared for)

There will always be differences between how your organization does things and the organization you are integrating. While most of the focus will be on the application stack, you cannot ignore your interfaces.

What do I mean by interfaces?

For any application to be useful, there must be some form of interaction. This can be the periodic streaming of data, an that gets tickled from a vendor, or your end users/customers interacting with the new application.

While some of these differences maybe out of your control (especially 3rd-party vendors), there are others that could have a bigger impact during the integration work. How data is migrated and, more importantly, how the new applications are migrated and exposed to their new users.

One example is how your org exposes the user facing applications versus how the acquired org hosts expose theirs. It may seem pretty simple and would be left to the UX team. However this question will expose some underlying assumptions between both organizations that can cost months of integration time and/or result in changing migration approaches midstream to resolve.

As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

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