By Tom Hearn / 19 Mar 2024 / Topics: Change and training
We’ve seen many companies strategically choose to divest from a parent company that’s holding them back from modernization. For this organization, their parent company was failing to meet industry standards for security and reliability — a critical priority as the threat of data breaches were becoming greater by the day.
In the midst of this change, the business improved scalability at its new, more modern data centers, and realized greater speed and responsiveness with Flash storage. They also improved business continuity with advanced data protection and backup and enabled their team to regularly test their incident response plans through round table exercises with our team’s up to date threat knowledge.
Fractured data and inconsistent reporting processes are commonplace without any M&A or divestiture activity. For one of our clients (a national restaurant chain) a divestiture left the business with even murkier visibility and messier processes. So they used the change as a launchpad to finally build a single source of truth.
What they prioritized:
The new data environment led to major improvements in analytics, providing unmatched insights into important financial and customer metrics — from guest wait times to food preparation times, incident reports and overall sales. It also prepared the way for integration with online ordering and delivery services.
And by replacing the outdated approach to database storage with a more flexible, scalable
data architecture and consolidating resources, the client reduced operational costs by more than $13,000 per month.
When separating their IT organization from their parent company, Cub Foods needed an end-to-end strategy for migration, adoption and change management.
What they prioritized:
Cub Foods has since improved the way employees work across the entire business. The upgrade enabled more real-time teamwork among internal groups, and the change made it easier to share and control versions of documents. And, the SSO implementation means that future apps will be ready to use right away (instead of requiring development time for identity management). The support and managed services transferred ongoing management tasks, which freed up Cub’s small IT team to focus on their continued transformation.
After a long history of acquiring 900+ hospitals across the U.S., this veterinary health firm had many legacy systems that they needed to modernize. To modernize its network services, the client wanted to upgrade infrastructure across hundreds of sites. The project aimed to support a new internet-based phone system and a web app that was coming soon for the hospital branches — which required a stronger network infrastructure to operate on.
What they prioritized:
This modernization project resulted in improved performance of our client’s
infrastructure and systems, allowing the pet health firm more freedom to innovate in the future. Consolidated IT management from Insight streamlined and addressed localized IT needs. As the organization moves away from acquisitions and toward building its own locations, it anticipates the need for modern systems work in the future.
In each of these snapshot stories, the drivers might be different, but the goal is the same: To keep the organization focused, organized, protected, and moving as a unified entity toward a singular target.
We’ve found that this checklist is a great high-level starting point that helps businesses account for all the moving parts of M&A and divestiture activity.
Tom Hearn, Vice President Field Architecture, Insight
Over the course of Tom’s 15+ year career, he has established himself as a strategic technical leader with deep knowledge of infrastructure, development, automation, DevOps and security. He is extremely passionate about helping clients solve their tech challenges, which has helped him thrive in his role at Insight.
