While I’ve been emphasizing the tech side of the equation from the integration standpoint, there is another thing that I haven’t touched on as much, and is just as equally important: the cultural impact with the tech.

I was conversing with someone online recently looking at the corporate culture and how it would impact the success of the integration phase. Granted the conversation applied globally across the companies, however even the engineering orgs will have their own internal culture.

What kind of impact would this look like?

  • Different approaches to managing infrastructure ranging from automation to environment definitions (hardware, software, networking)
  • Different approaches to change management
  • Different levels of risk tolerances
  • Different approaches and willingness of gaining and sharing experience
  • Differences in management styles

As you can see none of these would be deal breakers on their own, but can either accelerate or stop your integration in its tracks.

The astute reader will see there is a lot of vagueness in there. Some of this can be picked up as a part of the planning (think of the pre-acquisition wargame exercise for the baseline), and a part of it you won’t know about until you’re buying some new hardware and it will take 6 months for someone on the other company to approve of the installation.

Have you seen any examples of these resulting in a last minute major bottleneck?

cab