„Whenever you look at any potential merger or acquisition, you look at the potential to create value for your shareholders“
-DILIP SHANGHVI
Your company has received approval to acquire a product portfolio of a smaller company that will extend its market share and enable it to extend product offering. Acquired product systems range diverse technical platforms with both internal and outsourced operations. How to extend existing product systems to include the acquired company’s product applications?

Mergers and acquisitions can’t be handled within the boundaries of one isolated business unit and related IT unless the scope is tiny enough. Typically, the acquisition crosses single domain and requires cross-product or enterprise view to plan business change.
Important principle to start with is the decision on which way to go: add the acquired product portfolio and related IT systems by benefiting from an expanded range of product offering, or, do merger as data migration exercise gaining from simpler IT and more efficient operations. Assuming that the task force of enterprise architects prepared a vision and secured the approval of the latter, we will deeper discuss a technical data migration.
Technical data migration
You start an architecture description with definition of product scope and then specify product attributes according to implementation in source and target systems. Then, you perform product mapping exercise as part of gap analysis. Finally, you plan technical solutions for data migration and update the architecture description document.
The architecture description summary can be described in a number of different views:
Source systems – A high level description of IT systems at Source company
Migration scope – A summary of the main data objects to be migrated grouped per area
Data migration flow – A summary of the basic guidelines for defining what data the technical migration will handle and how

Migration planning overview – A summary of technical migration planning
Technical solutions – A summary of the common services used throughout the technical migration project
Interim solutions – A description of solutions produced by the technical migration project, but used not only during migration but also in production before and/or after the technical migration
Availability during migration – A summary of the limitations in availability imposed by the technical migration
The document gives overall description of the broad design of solutions that migration project is responsible of. Architecture description includes temporary automated data migration routines and new/changed solutions put into production.
Reduced solution delivery time and development cost
Migration project benefits from running cross-product or enterprise wide. Enterprise architecture fosters reductions in development time, fewer project failures, and tighter linkage of applications to business needs by using well-designed, standardized, reusable parts of an enterprise-wide basis.