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Investigating on the role of EA management in Mergers & Acquisitions - Initial findings from a literature analysis and an expert survey

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) lead to substantial changes for the companies involved. The resulting enterprise transformation is challenging as it includes, among others, elements like business processes, organizational units, applications, data, and infrastructure components. Enabling the alignment of business and information technology (IT), the discipline of Enterprise Architecture (EA) management provides a holistic perspective on those elements as well as their relationships. Moreover, EA management fosters communication and provides a consistent information base and therefore is able to contribute to the success of M&A. However, currently there exists only little work investigating on the role, benefit, and usage of EA management in M&A. In this paper, we therefore peruse EA management literature to identify tasks and artifacts beneficial for this type of enterprise transformation. Furthermore, we compare these findings with the results of a survey conducted among experts at three European EA management conferences. Both, literature analysis and expert survey help to build a basis for further research regarding the application of EA management during M&A.