In tough economic times, more and more organisations are looking to merge, but what does this mean for their IT infrastructure? Gareth Jones takes a look at two examples.

Livability

The merger between John Grooms and the Shaftesbury Society in 2007, which created the organisation now called Livability, was not a standard two-way merger. The charity John Grooms had a long-standing relationship with the John Grooms Housing Association, so as the former was merging with the Shaftesbury Society, they also entered into a formal partnership with the latter, which would be renamed Livability Housing. This effectively made it a three-way merger and added an extra dimension to the IT requirements.

One key challenge was that the Shaftesbury Society had outsourced its IT whereas the two John Grooms organisations had in-house teams. Because the outsourcing contract had time left to run, the decision was taken to operate a hybrid arrangement, with the two sides working alongside each other until the outsourcing contract came up for renewal in 2009. At this point a new IT team was created to take over the entire infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the two John Grooms organisations were based in one building while the Shaftesbury Society was in another, meaning that while the merger and integration of the organisations was taking place, there was also the job of closing down the Shaftesbury Society’s head office and moving everyone into the one building. “Because of the obvious cost savings that was done relatively quickly,” explains John Bragg, information and communication systems transition project director at Livability.

“To get that speed”, he adds, “one network was lifted up from Wimbledon, brought over to the building here and put alongside the existing network, so there was quite a complex setup of networks running alongside each other.” The outsourcing company working at the Shaftesbury Society was tasked with coordinating this move, liaising with John Grooms’ in-house team on how it would be set up and accommodated on arrival.

He adds that due to the merger and the organisation’s focus resting on a range of other issues, the network hardware had been allowed to age, so the decision was taken to replace the infrastructure with an entirely new network. As a result, at one stage the organisation was running three networks simultaneously. “There were some challenges in doing that and there were a few jittery moments, such as when we had an old server that terminally failed, but we managed to recover in hours so it wasn’t hugely disruptive.”

In terms of software, the decision on what CRM to use was relatively straightforward. “John Grooms charity and the Shaftesbury Society both ran [Blackbaud’s] Raiser’s Edge, albeit different versions. So in terms of which to choose that was very simple and straightforward, it was the latest version of Raiser’s Edge, and then it was a case of merging the databases and going through the real nitty gritty stuff of making sure donors weren’t on there twice.”

Areas where the organisations were using different software were payroll and HR. “At the end of day a payroll system is a payroll system is a payroll system, so in terms of the functionally they were pretty similar. Therefore the decision was taken based on how many staff were using the existing systems and how much data was in them, so what would have the least impact in terms of having to migrate the data across from one system to another, and from a staff point of view how many people were already trained in using the system.” As a result of this process, the team chose Payright for the organisation’s payroll and Computers in Personnel’s Ciphr for HR.

Accounting software was more tricky as all three organisations were using different systems. “At the point the merger took place we still had to run all three so that they could produce all their final accounts, so effectively we were running three systems for quite a while. The decision on which one to go with was based on looking at the functionality and our needs. The housing association’s needs were slightly more complex, so it was decided that SunAccounts [from Infor] would be a better system as it was felt to be more flexible that the other two.”