ProductOps Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) Integrated Risk Management In Due Diligence & Post-Transaction Integration
Oct 28, 2021
Protecting Your Business Growth Strategies From M&A Transaction Through Integration
On The Board or C-Suite?
Running a company is all about risk. Do you understand how one decision at the top flows through the rest of the organization? For example, executing on mergers and acquisitions integrations (MA&I) where business growth strategies converge with digital skills and assets. What if learning how to operate with risk you were able to rally the entire company around safer execution?
Part 1 in this series: “Risk Enabled Growth: Business Strategies to Leveraging Risk & Capitalizing on Digital Growth Opportunities" included the perspectives of cybersecurity and integrated risk management expert Jeff Sauntry of Risk Neutral, privacy, risk, and compliance experts Rob Harvey and Greg Kraft of Online Business Systems, and business strategy, product innovation, and product security expert Jeremy Vaughan from Tauruseer Inc.
Watch if your role involves:
- Maximizing value creation achieved at the synergy of talent, tangible, and intangible assets
- Enabling trusted digital experiences for employees, partners, and customers
- Oversight for Strategic, Operational, Financial, Compliance or Reputation Risk as part of your organization's 3-Lines of Defense (3LoD)
- Mitigating the potential disruptive impact of events and unlocking the economic potential of your organization's resources and assets
Learn:
- How converged, mature risk management capabilities enable trusted digital experiences for employees, partners, and customers.
- Why minimizing deviation from expected outcomes creates market growth leadership.
- Why systemic risk treatment capabilities create culture that maximizes growth.
Continued discussion themes in the series:
- Why key business growth milestones and organizational capabilities evolve over time to either enable or hinder an organization's ability to achieve strategic goals.
- Why Enterprise-wide efforts to create a ubiquitous 'risk aware' culture, supported by aligned resources and orchestrated oversight, allow organizations to take advantage of growth opportunities.
- How leadership teams can utilize informed scenario responses, focused on protecting the organization's most important tangible & intangible assets will enable an acceptable level of risk exposure.
- How industry leaders achieve sector leading growth and financial returns utilizing risk-informed pricing and unlock the economic potential of megatrends by continuously earning stakeholder trust.
Leveraging ProductOps Risk Management on Digital Growth Opportunities
Slide 11, 24:19 Transcript
Alright, so we’ve rolled through the layers of strategic decisions where things looked good on paper. But the reality is those decisions converge in execution with the company’s digital assets.
So, let’s talk about that.
In this scenario, the company led 7 acquisitions over 5 years. That means the first integration couldn’t have been completed before introducing the next. Within all these firms, everyone has different skills / work streams / tech stacks and various levels of process maturities. The complexity, and therefore the risks, are compounded with each acquisition.
This brings up a good point though. Not having a more diverse due diligence team introduces unnecessary risk into the transaction because blind spots were not revealed until after these acquisitions were complete. It appears cybersecurity risk management capabilities were not appropriately considered here.
For example, and Rob mentioned it earlier, “poor hygiene.” These are risks that exist in most companies today and can easily be exploited. Things like:
- Poor configuration management (as seen in this case)
- Inefficient management of administrative privileges
- The inability to gain risk insight into the processes or tools used to deliver products (like seen here, and if you remember SolarWinds and several others this year)
- Unmanaged Code Rot
- Open-Source Vulnerabilities
- Shadow IT (or your unmanaged assets)
- Secrets in code that go undetected or lack context
- Finally, no visibility or governance around any of this
Let’s go down another layer.
The organization wants improvement. They hire the right leadership to develop product security programs to align their technologies, processes, and activities with the objectives and strategy.
Improvement includes everything throughout a product’s entire lifecycle, and the risks due to insecure, unchecked, or unmanaged behaviors, processes, and technologies.
This is impossible without context. The cost of neglecting visibility and the understanding of risk with context, leads to disaster. And we’ve seen this scenario play out over and over.
This can be achieved. And Greg tee’d it up earlier. ProductOps. For example:
- Building a dynamic, real-time Product Inventory
- Contextualizing Bill of Materials with your dependencies, outdated components & associated vulnerabilities
- “Fingerprinting” contributor activity and behaviors to specific products and supporting infrastructure
- Detecting contextual configuration differences
- Appropriately prioritizing risks so teams can focus on the right things
- And, integrating more capabilities to match the risk program maturity over time
Right now, most companies are operating in a very dangerous “Catch Me If You Can” mindset.
For example, if we look at Home Depot or Zoom, they took the time to fix their issues while putting other work on hold. Other high-profile examples only did this AFTER being caught.
Good risk management is the balance of aligning strategic objectives with performance management …in the operations of every team.
Product-Centric Risk Context. This is not just about developers and their tools. EVERYONE needs access and visibility to work together and avoid risk.
With context, EVERYONE gets continuous feedback and accountability. This is systemic risk treatment from top to bottom.
The result?
Higher quality, better informed decisions at the product and portfolio levels. Risk ownership is now aligned with business objectives which are aligned with growth goals.
Please check back for registration of Part 2 of the series.
This was part of Tech Executives' Executive Leadership & Board Members Summit focus on "Business Strategies: Leveraging Risk & Capitalizing on Digital Growth Opportunities".
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