Expanded Understanding of IS/IT Related Challenges in Mergers and Acquisitions: Methods & Research Context

Organizational Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As) occur at an increasingly frequent pace in today’s business life. Paralleling this development, M&As has increasingly attracted attention from the Information Systems (IS) domain. This emerging line of research has started form an understanding of the challenges exacerbating related IT integration and the requirements on participating organizations to address these challenges. Extant literature has two limitations; the first limitation is that it has studied IS/IT issues in M&As in a limited set of industrial domains, the second limitation is that it has relied almost exclusively on two research methods: case studies and surveys. This research has the potential to improve our understanding of challenges and solutions in M&A activity, we attend to this potential through an explorative research approach.. In this paper, we adopted the focus group gathering technique (new method), specifically a ‘less-structured’ focus group process as well as the KJ method for analysis. We also used technology intensive companies as the research context (new industry domain) as they represent an unexplored industry with the potential for new knowledge according to Toppenberg & Henningsson (2013). Based on the analysis we identify gaps in the extant literature and suggest directions for future research.