The CIO as an Acquisition Partner

In a recent post on Information Week, John Soat asks "Is the CIO an effective position to enlist in your company’s mergers and acquisitions strategy?"

This post raises some interesting issues. The first is the role of the CIO in the acquisition (there are no mergers) due diligence process. The second is the issue of the actual need for technology due diligence.

I think the CIO has a major role to play, but that may be lost on the executive team who see IT as the stuff that gets tied up once the light turns green. What they fail to realise is that in an IT-centric world, IT due diligence needs to happen near the start of the process.

However if the tech vendors and to some extent the users have their way, we will all be moving to web services. There will be multiple stove pipe solutions in use in the organisations involved. There will thus be less of an integration issue as the infrastructural aspects of the IT will be the vendors’ problem. This is both a simplistic perspective and an extreme one. However I believe that we need to give this scenario some consideration. As it will also herald the death of the end-user IT function.