Integration and value creation
Diligence finds the value. Integration decides whether it survives.
Post-close execution, platform building and technology advisory for acquired businesses and their boards.
Day one and the first hundred days
Platforms built to scale
Roadmap and governance, retained
Nothing dramatic goes wrong. The plan slips quietly, and by the time anyone adds it up the date has moved.
Every plan assumes technology keeps pace. It rarely does, and the reasons repeat.
Integration gets run as an IT project when it is a business sequencing problem. The platform gets built for the group’s current shape instead of its intended one. And nobody owns the technology agenda at the level where the decisions are actually made.
What we do
After completion
Day one and the first hundred days
Readiness, sequencing and orchestration of what has to happen immediately, with governance that reports in terms a board can act on.
Integration orchestration
Programme direction across the workstreams that carry an integration: identity and tenant consolidation, network and data centre transition, cloud and application migration, end user estate transfer, service transition. TechAlign owns sequencing, dependency management and governance.
Integration architecture and playbook
The target architecture for the platform, and the repeatable method that makes the second acquisition faster than the first. On a buy-and-build thesis that is the difference between an acquisition programme and an acquisition capability.
IT target operating model
How technology is organised, sourced, governed and funded in the platform as it is meant to look, not as it currently looks.
Technology cost and commercial optimisation
Licensing, contracts, consumption and supplier arrangements measured against what the business actually needs. Often the fastest route to margin inside the current year.
Supplier and delivery partner governance
Most businesses depend on a managed service provider or systems integrator nobody internally can hold to account. TechAlign assesses the arrangement, defines what good looks like, and governs it on the board’s behalf. No relationship, partnership or referral arrangement exists with any provider.
Platform governance and data maturity
The governance, data foundations and security posture a platform needs before it can scale, and that a buyer will examine at exit.
Exit readiness
Technology assessed the way an acquirer will assess it, early enough to fix what would otherwise be found in their diligence and priced into their offer.
A roadmap written once and filed is worth very little. The value is in keeping it true.
Retained
Roadmap design and programme governance
Conditions change, acquisitions land, priorities move. Within two quarters a roadmap written once describes a business that no longer exists. The value was never in the artefact.
Roadmap design
A technology roadmap built against the plan for the business, sequenced by dependency and by when each item starts constraining the thesis. Costed, and written so a board can approve it without translation.
Programme governance
TechAlign chairs the technology programme, holds delivery partners to their commitments, and reports to the board on a fixed cycle. What is on track, what is not, what it costs to fix, and what needs a decision this quarter.
Board and investor reporting
A standing view of technology after completion, in the same language as the rest of the deal case. No status packs describing activity.
Continuity between the peaks
Diligence and integration are intense and finite. Ownership is neither. This is the arrangement that keeps a technology agenda alive in between, which is why it is retained.
Typically a defined monthly or quarterly commitment, scoped to the size of the business and the stage of its plan.
Plans fail in the gap between roadmap and execution
The work holds up in that gap because the people doing it have run the programmes: identity and tenant consolidation, network and data centre transition, cloud and application migration, end user estate transfer, service transition, in complex and regulated environments.
The emphasis now sits on orchestration, governance and roadmap, which is where an owner gets most from the firm. Delivery pedigree is what makes that orchestration worth having. Durations come from experience. Dependencies surface before they bite.
Where a business has no internal capability and TechAlign is the right party to execute, it takes that seat too.
Knowing when a delivery partner is having a hard month, and when they are quietly in trouble, is a distinction that costs real money to get wrong.
CIO capability without the permanent hire
Plenty of businesses need CIO-level judgement and cannot justify a full-time CIO. TechAlign provides it directly: board-level technology leadership, strategy and governance, on a defined commitment.
This is advisory work. The firm answers to the owners and the board, and says what it thinks.
Holding an asset where technology is limiting the plan?
Tell us the situation. We will say straight away whether we are the right firm for it.