Strategic Alignment In Mergers And Acquisitions: Theorizing IS Integration Decision making.

Authors

Manjari Mehta
Rudy HirschheimFollow

Abstract

This paper focuses on IS integration decisions made during mergers and acquisitions from a strategic-alignment lens. The objectives of this study are to: (1) examine business-IS alignment as reflected in IS integration decisions in a merger context and (2) identify factors that shape IS integration decisions in a merger context. We study these issues in three oil and gas mergers from pre-merger announcement to three to four years after merger announcement. Our contributions are three-fold. We show that firms are somewhat misaligned in the early post-merger period, and come into alignment only two to three years after the merger. We find that business-IS alignment was a minor concern for the new organizations in pre-merger and early post-merger phases. Other factors such as acquirer-target power struggles, prior merger experience, and overarching synergy goals drove much of the initial integration decision making. Only late in the post-merger do the merged organizations revisit their systems to bring them into alignment with the business needs.

Recommended Citation

Mehta, Manjari and Hirschheim, Rudy (2007) "Strategic Alignment In Mergers And Acquisitions: Theorizing IS Integration Decision making.," Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 8(3), .
DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00118
Available at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/vol8/iss3/8

DOI

10.17705/1jais.00118