Companies undergo mergers on a fairly regular basis. The typical merger or acquisition brings another company under the umbrella of another company. This may have a significant impact, such as two banks merging into one, or is may be of a lesser impact where a conglomerate brings a related company under its wing. In either case, one company will need to merge redundant operations, financial functions, business units and other aspects of the enterprise with the newly acquired entity.

Merger and acquistion planning is an executive activity. However, the operational inputs to these plans as well as the activities that result from the invocation of these plans require information about an enterprise's business architecture. This includes identifying all aspects of a business that overlap with the merged / acquiring entity so that management can articulate and rollout a complete operational deployment plan.

Consider the merger of one insurance company with a property and casualty business being incorporated by a larger entity with many lines of business. All P&C functionality and operational capabilities, including the relationship between business unit components and IT components, must be identified for subsequent merger deployment.

The elements of a business that would be required as part of the business architecture in this scenario includes the following.

• Organizational capabilities (or functions) relating to the P&C business
• Organizational units that perform these capabilities
• All business processes related to the P&C business and supporting functions
• Business rules relating to the P&C business
• Common set of semantic used by P&C business
• Supplier / partners that extend the virtual enterprise in the P&C business
• All IT related assets that support the P&C business

In addition to the identification of the above elements of the business, management requires an enterprise map identifying the relationships of the above organizational elements.