Balancing Responsiveness and Cost

In many cases, the benefits sought in mergers and acquisitions are market scale and reduced cost. Post-merger, the new entity still has at least two fundamentally distinct groups of people and ways of working and each of them will have different opinions on how to achieve that benefit. While solutions like common endpoint computing and network infrastructure are readily appreciated, can we achieve additional implied cost savings by centralising all support functions and applications to one common platform?

If the technology strategy is to centralise everything, that can reduce responsiveness to individual Business Units (BU); however, if services are managed regionally, that can raise costs and risks. Further complications arise on how to fund, decide and scope projects. Lastly, keeping pace with technology trends and the changing business environment means that whatever the solution, it is now obsolete. The end outcome often is that central standards are unevenly applied and the list of shadow IT solutions keeps growing, as the reputation of central IT gets lower.

This whitepaper synthesised the findings from the nine questions, listed in the appendix, posed to fourteen technology executives and research carried out by the author, Jon Baxter, to give some innovative ideas, practical tips and finally, some alternative perspectives on this problem. 

This whitepaper is aimed at corporate technology directors; however, those implicated in the domains below can also draw inspiration. These are:

• Strategy

• Demand Management

• Portfolio Management

• Governance

• Digital Transformation

• Stakeholder Engagement

• Benefits Realisation.

We’ve used the Mergers and Acquisitions scenario to illustrate the issues corporate companies face in balancing responsiveness and cost to their portfolio business units or lines of business

As a result of interviewing of our interviews, conducting analysis and experience-based research, this whitepaper defines the problem in “Balancing Cost and Responsiveness”. We introduce the Context Specific Solution Strategy.