Last week, I wanted to take the theme of new tech evaluation to its logical conclusion from the acquisition front by asking:

What questions would you ask when acquiring a new business?

From the tech leadership standpoint, this can get quite nebulous if you have just a very high level of what’s where in your organization. There is a book from Scott Bernard called Holistic Enterprise Architecture for Mergers and Acquisitions that looks at fleshing out the stack from the network and infrastructure standpoint all the way up to the strategic goals and initiatives with slices for each line of business and the gaps being filled by your company standards, skills, and security posture.

Ultimately, the more you can flesh this out for the new business being acquired, the better.

However, in the cloud/SaaS based world, there are a lot more 3rd-party services that would negate some of the bottom tiers of infrastructure (if you’re running workloads on cloud providers like Azure or AWS, then that counts as your bottom tier). What I’m getting at are the SaaS based solutions for things like CRMs, API and Identity management. This should address the application layer.

The initiatives being undertaken by the acquired business will tell you what’s in flight on their end, and what may not be fully baked and ready for conveyance when the deal closes. Expect this to be the biggest wildcard.

The staff and skills breakdown cannot be missed either. This will indicate how many people would need to be kept on to help facilitate the conveyance as well as their comfort level with your stack. Also, it can clue you in on how much of the IT functions have been outsourced vs. kept in-house and the turn-around times you can expect.

I know, this didn’t include any questions per-se, but more focus areas for the questions. The questions themselves will be situation dependent yet should be used primarily to flesh out the similarities and differences between the two orgs to help ascertain what to convey.

cab