Influence of mergers and acquisitions on IT: An IT-leveraged business model to enable scalable growth

This paper focuses on the influence of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) on information technology (IT), particularly on IT Governance, Knowledge Management (KM) and Virtual Work (VW). M&A have long played an important role in the growth of a firm. A merger means any transaction that forms one economic unit from two or more previous ones. An acquisition means that the acquirer company takes control of the target company. The methodology used for this paper was based on a research case conducted on CEMEX, the world's third-largest producer and marketer of cement and ready-mix concrete products. Reflecting a long-term industry trend toward consolidation, CEMEX had nearly increased seven times its production capacity through an intensive program of international acquisitions since 1992. The case study focuses on the scalable growth anchored by the "CEMEX Way" - an IT dynamic standardization business model that adopted best practices found across the company as process standards to boost efficiency, realize economies of scale, and increase the quality and speed of post-merger integration (PMI) leveraged by IT.