Book of the Month – January 2023
Holistic Enterprise Architecture for Mergers and Acquisitions by Scott Bernard
The EA6 Cube is a well-known and widely used model in enterprise architecture. One of its key benefits is a comprehensive breakdown of the enterprise into architectural domains and threads. It allows to capture the fundamental aspects of any organization at the appropriate level of detail.
Given that, it is no wonder that it is widely used in mergers and acquisitions. In that case, utilizing this framework can depict organization with different structures and functions, so that they can be compared, which supports decision making. To sum up, this is what this book is about – it is a detailed deep dive into the use of the EA6 Cube in the process of mergers and acquisitions. It shows how to create a new effective organization from the melding of two separate, often quite different, organizations.
An understanding of how people and things are employed in the organization is crucial to be able to successfully combine them. The author continues by examining each stage of the merger / acquisition process. “Pre-deal” and “post-deal” stages in particular to understand what is going wrong and makes suggestion for improvement.
One of the key points of the book is that organizations are not well understood. Thus, a simple, intuitive approach to visualizing structure and function like a holistic EA6 framework could be helpful in achieving this understanding. He demonstrates it well in an illustrative story about the acquisition of a fictional company in the health care sector. In fact, by outlining each stage of the process and giving the reader a peak into “behind the scenes”, the author makes a winning case for using the organization-wide approach throughout merger and acquisition activities.
Who would benefit from reading this book?
We can highly recommend this book to anyone who would like to get a better understanding of their organization. Furthermore, it will be an especially good read to those who are interested in merger and acquisition process.
The book can be purchased in print in your favorite bookshop. There is also a PDF version available on Amazon.
If you want to check our previous Book of the Month selection, you can find it here:
Book of the Month – Corporate Explorer by A. Binns, C. O’Reilly and M. Tushman