Mergers and acquisitions MA are amongst the most strategic decisions that are taken in the corporate world. The directors of companies that engage in the MA arena must ensure that they take all practical steps to ensure that shareholder value is at least preserved, and are ideally enhanced by the MA process. They have to be aware of the potential for criminal and civil proceedings from regulatory bodies or shareholder groups if their corporate governance is called into question in matters of transparency and performance.

In order to maximize the potential for adding shareholder value to a merger or acquisition, not only should the financial strategy be sound but there should be strategic reviews of all areas of operation of the resulting corporate entity. Apart from formulating a change program within the new corporate entity, operational efficiency across the organization and a corresponding quality assurance is highly necessitated. And this is realized with an independent IT testing organization that would bring the benefits of objectivity, experience and expertise in strategy and operational implementation that will deliver cost effective risk mitigation, which will ensure delivery of IT systems that enable organizations to compete globally in a constantly changing corporate landscape.

IT systems underpin the successful operations of all departments: sales, marketing, HR, and all supply chain activities would not function effectively without robust and reliable IT systems aligned to deliver the functionality relevant to the respective department. And, in an MA situation, major change programs usually result in a level of IT change and development that is far larger than the size of the projected business. In order to effect the IT change, in the timescales required to deliver the enhanced shareholder value promised in the MA strategy, it is almost always the case that external IT suppliers are required to provide the additional resources required to implement the IT change program. All this is possible only with robust and reliable IT systems, which mandates testing as its process.

Today there are two major test strategies in play within most IT dependent companies- the requirements based testing, appropriate when there is a major application refresh within an otherwise stable organization, and risk based testing, when change is required in every area of the new business.

In an MA scenario, coercion of software, new to the existing customer is, unfortunately, an option. A user acceptance test at such a juncture is the best practice in IT development or procurement; it makes good business sense too.

The business value of a company resides in the data stored within the systems and the applications, and these data vary from system to system and application to application. Sometimes as binary data in a database, or may be held as human readable text files, or it might be transmitted between applications in an XML schema. In an established IT environment, the same data will exist in multiple locations and formats. Extending the IT environment with a new interface, system or application will require that the existing data maintains its validity as it moves from one place to another, and for the same data migration testing is required.

Operational IT costs account for 70-80 of most organization s entire IT budget, and hence companies should focus on their operational SLA Service Level Agreements SLAs with the business units, and for this the IT infrastructure should undergo the Operational Acceptance test, which involves technical testing such as interoperability, disaster recovery tests, security testing and various forms of performance testing such as load and stress tests to ensure that the systems are available, responsive and resilient to the levels required by the business.

For an efficient and effective running of the merged or acquired organization, robust and reliable IT systems is a must, and the benefits of these is realized with an independent IT testing organization.

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