Thanks again to OMG and Brenda Michelson and Karen Larkowski at SOA-Consortium and BPM-Consortium for putting me on the schedule for the special meeting last week in San Antonio.  When I was asked to participate, the guidance on topic selection could have been perceived as daunting - rather than look into internals of how to construct #SOA or #BPM, I was asked to broaden the horizon and consider opportunities opened by leveraging these approaches in the real world.   My initial response was - "so, you want me to go from "Whoa, #SOA!" to "What could I do with this given an opportunity?" posture?  No problem!"

I had a lot of interesting interviews and research in creating this presentation.  Most people only see the results of M&A gone wrong on the front pages of newspapers, news, or talking heads shows.  As I continued to dig into the space, I realized that one of my favorite soap boxes applied here just as well as it applies in Project Management world.  Success (or more likely) failure, depends far less on easily quantifiable benefits like cash on hand and real estate owned than is given attention to during most integration strategy and planning meetings.  It depends far more on intangible organizational assets - culture and people.  As the Hewitt and Associates study shows, 90% of integration planning is spent on accounting, financials, and operations.  Yet  80% of what goes wrong is attributed organizational culture and departure of key resources.  The easily quantifiable "stuff" has dependencies on these "squishy" topics, and it's clear that a lot of merging and acquiring organizations find the successful outcomes elusive because these dependencies are not properly documented and addressed.

As part of illustrating what could go wrong, I created this handy TSA-Style Threat Level Chart based on the "Enterprise Architecture as Strategy" book by Jeanne Ross et al from MIT Sloan School of Business.  The insight of "Know Thyself" applies doubly here - to both organizations.  And while the colors are only warnings and not deterministic indicators of outcome, the amount of attention given to non-easily quantifiable areas of integration planning should vary based on where your organizations fall on this chart.   Another insight is that Integration Capability Portfolio can be used for internal integrations.  As most large organizations are aggregates of smaller business units, optimizing positive outcomes of reorganization is an ongoing concern.  The Capability-Based Approach planning techniques described in the presentation can be easily applied to the reorganization or internal consolidation scenarios.  

Here is the link to download the full presentation.  SOA-Consortium recorded the session, and I will post the link to the podcast once it becomes available.