14. Merger and Acquisition Preparedness Building: An Enterprise Architecture Perspective

The increasing rate of Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As) draws attention of researchers and academics alike; however, the significant failure rate of such complex enterprise-wide transformations typically posing ‘wicked’ problems suggests a significant potential for improvements. Much research has been conducted to investigate the issues and problems in M&As in order to find and propose various ways to increase the percentage of positive outcomes. This abundance of M&A research creates a need to synthesise the existing results in order to propose a collective way to address M&A issues. In addition, due to the complexity, dynamicity and time constraints of M&As it seems that there is little time to implement the recommendation of the research community. This paper proposes a way to address this dilemma through building preparedness for M&As. Thus, before the actual M&A implementation, organisations undertake preventative measures to acquire necessary systemic properties (such as flexibility, agility, etc.), in order to be in a better position to address anticipatable or emergent issues.