Challenges of concurrent Acquisitions

Concurrent integrations can be incredibly complex, especially from an IT standpoint. One of the most impactful challenges is resource (people) constraints. Even if you bring in external consulting partners (and many companies do for scale), internal resources remain critical. Consulting firms won’t have full visibility into the buyer’s standards, policies, architecture decisions, or operational nuances. That internal institutional knowledge is essential, especially when making integration decisions that align with long-term strategy.

The challenge compounds when the buyer has a decentralized IT operating model. For example, when business units manage their own IT but rely on shared services for cybersecurity, collaboration tools, infrastructure, and other cross-cutting capabilities, you quickly run into ownership and alignment issues. Each acquisition will require slightly different decisions around integration vs. coexistence. Without a centralized decision-making process, priorities can conflict, and dependencies may be missed. Add to that the variation in technical debt, maturity levels, and IT staffing across acquired entities, and you’re juggling multiple timelines, toolsets, and communication styles. Even something as foundational as getting everyone on the same identity platform or endpoint management solution becomes a major lift when multiplied across concurrent acquisitions.

Governance, prioritization, and standardization become make-or-break factors. When you’re handling concurrent acquisitions, having a structured integration framework and intake process is essential to avoid chaos and burnout. The integration framework should establish the categories of integration (e.g., identity and access, collaboration, endpoint management, network integration, application rationalization, etc.) and define what “full integration,” “partial integration,” or “standalone” looks like for each. This gives you a common language for scoping and communicating across teams, and helps decision-makers quickly assess what’s realistic based on timelines and available capacity. It also helps to align integration levels with business intent. For instance, a bolt-on acquisition that needs to be fully operational under the parent brand might need deep integration across all IT functions. On the other hand, a standalone operation might just need basic cybersecurity controls and compliance visibility.

The intake process acts like a triage mechanism. When a new acquisition comes in, you need a consistent way to evaluate:

– What systems and processes they use today
– Their IT maturity and resourcing
– Key risk areas (e.g., unsupported tech, lack of backups, security gaps)
– What level of integration is expected and by when
– Which shared services are impacted, and how

This initial assessment lets you make early, informed decisions about prioritization. For example, you might delay application integration but fast-track identity and device management to ensure basic security hygiene. Without a defined intake process, each integration effort ends up reinventing the wheel, and your shared services teams get crushed under competing demands from multiple directions.

Ultimately, having these structures in place will not eliminate the complexity—but it gives you a fighting chance to manage it.