A Dual View on IT Challenges in Corporate Divestments and Acquisitions

Acquisitions of new businesses and divestments of existing ones are frequently components of large organizations’ corporate strategies. In both acquisitions and divestments, corporate IT infrastructure plays a critical role for realizing business objectives. In this paper, we take a dual view of the IT-related challenges in divestment and acquisition strategies, studying them as a single integrated transaction between a buyer and a seller and investigating how the IT carve-out and IT integration strategies influence each other. The extant literature on the interaction between carve-outs and integration strategies is an empty set. Here, we begin to shed light to the limitations of the carve-out contract, the processes of carving out a business unit from one and integrating it into another multi-business organization, asymmetries in both parties’ preferences for an IT transaction process and its influence on arising challenges and organization performance.