The Challenge
A biotechnology company was preparing for a merger and had no formal M&A processes in place for IT specifically. Most of its existing company-wide standard operating procedures and templates were hard to locate, many out of date, and couldn’t be leveraged for this effort. The company was faced with the need to rationalize its commercial IT applications – including onboarding, retiring and/or enhancing existing applications – as part of the merger process. In order to meet the needs of regulators and shareholders, a proper management plan for the full IT portfolio integration needed to be created over a short period of time.
The Solution
CMK Select coordinated a number of different groups and departments to give everyone who had a stake in the acquisition an opportunity to voice their opinion on determining the application rationalization requirements. CMK recognized an opportunity to bring together a team of industry experts alongside key stakeholders in each of the affected departments within the organization – legal, compliance, security, digital marketing, patient services, etc. – to incorporate the assessments of all parties.
Drawing upon the consensus of each group, CMK then constructed a set of requirements for the various applications and brought forward a concrete plan detailing how to rationalize each one, whether retiring or decommissioning, onboarding or enhancing. The plan also required the team to assess data and outlined how to ensure it adhered to data retention requirements.
The Result
Over a period of six months, CMK rationalized approximately 50 applications; and with each rationalization, we provided the pharma corporation with an additional means of cost savings by reducing the number of month-to-month contracts they had to maintain.
