On the Tech Diligence newsletter, I throw out a weekly challenge to noodle through on the questions or considerations to think about from the pre-integration phase. The challenge for this week was:
Your company just purchased a rather large book of business from a competitor that is exiting the business. They are still planning to hold onto their custom applications, but will be sending you a dump of their customers in a structured format (think spreadsheets or XML).
This is a sample crib sheet based on the scenario of the challenge emphasizing a couple of scaling points with an external portal application. Will note that it depends on the timeline and the access available that dictates the level of detail.
Additionally, this is intended more as a quick read of the situation. Given the external customer portal won’t be able to support the expected 10x growth, this should force some additional consideration especially since there didn’t appear to be quick fix that would fit within the primary goal of a 6 month transition.
You will also note that I don’t call out any software development work that would be required to import the data. This is because, from an initial analysis, I concluded that it was something Widgets Ltd. was more than capable of handling in-house with their own resources. Same with their database support and internal applications.
Let me know if this is something you find useful and something you could use with your own efforts.