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When a whale swallowed Jonah, it “vomited” him ashore. Yuck. I guess a gangplank wasn’t an option.

Pinoccio and Gepetto, in contrast, exited their whale by way of a sneeze. In the Disney version, at least, the depiction was nowhere near as icky as you’d expect.

In actual oceans, whatever a whale swallows finds itself immersed in hydrochloric acid and digestive juices — a lethal and unpleasant prospect.

When a corporate whale swallows a smaller business, employees of the acquired business often find that experience unpleasant. Not as unpleasant as a whale’s digestive tract, but worse than being the swallower.

If you’re the swallowee, getting through the process while minimizing the misery starts with an unobstructed view of the acquiring company’s … no, stop that! Not its esophagus. Its plans. The big three:

Holding company: The whale bought your employer because it liked its products, services, ability to innovate, customer list, intellectual capital, or some other desirable characteristic.

Whatever the reason, some acquiring companies are careful to, changing zoological metaphors, avoid killing the golden goose.

What you’re in for: Mostly, your now quasi-autonomous business unit will have to pay a tithe to corporate. On top of which, instead of review by a friendly board of directors that’s well-attuned to your company’s business culture for review and approval, major capital proposals will probably go to a corporate executive leadership team that’s far more concerned with cost and risk reduction as outcomes than opportunities to increase revenue, marketshare, and mindshare.

In exchange, your CEO probably gets a seat at the table during the annual strategic planning retreat.

Overall, if you’re being added to a holding company, tomorrow will, for the most part, look a lot like yesterday.

Modified holding company: Large enterprise management culture emphasizes cost reduction above all other forms of business improvement. It’s epoxied in place, from the board of directors to the executive suite, and from there on down.

The companies they acquire are more likely to be entrepreneurial, with an executive team that cares far more about increasing revenue than about reducing costs.

As a consequence, acquiring companies often set “synergy targets” for each acquisition — opportunities to reduce costs by eliminating duplicative business functions.

As it turns out, eliminating many of these is hard. Often, really hard. Even something as seemingly generic as human resources turns out to have nuances that add a lot of complexity … and therefore cost … to the redundancy elimination effort.

But everyone’s names are on the synergy targets. And oh, by the way, your company has to find some way to pay for its corporate tithe, too.

The impact: Everything that can be easily handed off to corporate gets handed off to corporate. It starts with email and the rest of the productivity and collaboration suite. “Non-strategic sourcing” … purchasing and the associated accounts payable … is another likely candidate; so is recruiting.

That the waste is there to be eliminated is a political fact. Your job isn’t to argue that the political fact is operational fiction. You lost that argument the day everyone signed the acquisition documents.

Your job is to find the least painful functions to move to corporate and shine your spotlight on them in the hopes that this will distract everyone from the ones whose movement would do serious damage.

Integrated provider: They’re serious.

The folks who decided to acquire your company, that is. They envision your business as an integral part of a new whole, and they’re willing to invest the funds needed to turn their … sorry, there’s no other word for it … vision into reality.

This is where it becomes painful.

When you work for a smaller firm, some of your identity is wrapped up in your affinity for it. That’s going to go away. So is a lot of how you’re accustomed to getting things done.

That’s what you won’t like. But in exchange, there’s a much better chance that your new employer is run by pros. Integrating an acquisition is much, much harder than slapping one into a holding company. An executive team willing to go through the effort is an executive team worth you giving the benefit of your doubt.

The sooner you get over your sense of loss and start to actively contribute your bits and pieces to making it work, the more likely you are to benefit from the transaction.

KJRSpeak: “We gave them exactly what they asked for. Unfortunately, it isn’t what they wanted.”

Ben Deyo gave us exactly what we asked for with this little epigram. Sound familiar?

Dear Dr. Yeahbut …

Every time I turn around I read that IT needs application portfolio rationalization (APR).

I’m the newly appointed CIO in a mid-size (~$5B revenue) financial services enterprise. I’ve been reading the usual sources for these things and find the logic in favor of APR compelling. On the other hand(s) I find the logic in favor of another half-dozen or so management initiatives equally compelling. And I’ve been reading KJR long enough to remember your thoughts on the importance of maintaining focus (“Nailing governance,” 8/7/2006), which I find even more compelling.

I know we can’t do everything we really ought to do, which brings me to my question: What’s your take on APR? Should this make my top-three list?

You’re a consultant, so I know your answer will be “It depends.” What I want to know is what it should depend on.

– Seeker of Free Wisdom

Seeker …

Oy.

Before I can answer we’ll have to wade through something that’s frequently misrepresented or misunderstood, starting with the phrase itself.

APR is built around a metaphor – that IT can manage its application portfolio the way investors analyze their financial portfolios.

If you’re an investor, you assess and constantly reassess the funds and individual equities that constitute your portfolio. You determine their health and anticipated future value, use that insight to assign a disposition – buy, hold, partially divest, sell – to each of them, and act according to those dispositions.

APR theory says you should do think about your applications portfolio the same way – assess each application’s health, assign dispositions accordingly, and act on those dispositions.

This theory isn’t so much wrong as it is, as someone once put it, insufficiently right.

The applications your enterprise relies on to get its work done do constitute a portfolio. But (I am, after all, Dr. Yeahbut) that isn’t all they constitute.

That’s because of a fundamental and retrospectively obvious difference between a financial portfolio and an applications portfolio: With financial investments, buying or selling shares in a particular fund or equity has little impact on your investments in any of the other funds and equities you own. But in a portfolio of applications, you can’t decommission an application or replace it with another with impunity.

Beyond the portfolio view of its applications, IT also needs to consider them from the perspective of holistic design.

Holistic design is the difference between a pile of lumber, Romex, screws, nails, and so on and a structure you can inhabit. (Okay, this isn’t the best metaphor I’ve ever come up with, but let it go – it isn’t a rabbit hole worth falling into.)

Holistic design is how you figure out which collections of applications the enterprise needs to support each of its major areas of functional responsibility, how the applications within each collection interconnect to provide complete solutions, and how the collections interconnect with all of the other collections to support the enterprise-level need for information integration and process standardization.

In theory, if you’re handling holistic design well you wouldn’t need APR, because your holistic designs would determine exactly which applications you need and where you need them.

But as Benjamin Brewster once said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, while in practice there is.”

Bob’s last word: When it comes to an organization’s applications environment, it turns out the holistic and portfolio views aren’t just equally important.

They’re complementary.

More than that: APR is usually chartered as a once-and-done project. It takes the application inventory and, if you’re smart, your holistic application design as inputs, and produces a remediation roadmap as its primary output.

But (there’s that word again) … there’s a lot more to the story than that. But we’re out of our self-allotted space this week, so the rest will have to wait.

Bob’s sales pitch: This is a big, complicated subject, and there’s only so much I can handle in these weekly bite-size chunks. So more next week. And if you need a more in-depth conversation than what fits into this format, you know who to call.