The Risks in Making IT Integration an Afterthought in M&A DOWNLOAD HEKIMA’S M&A PLAYBOOK HERE Most M&A playbooks still position IT as a post-close workstream. Systems will be rationalized later. Security tools will be consolidated eventually. Identity will be addressed once business operations stabilize. This sequencing is backwards, particularly in

They Fail Because IT Leadership Lies to Itself.  Let’s stop using culture as a cover story.  When healthcare mergers fail, leadership almost always reaches for the same explanation: misaligned culture, resistance to change, people issues.  It sounds reasonable. It sounds empathetic. It is also a lie of convenience.  Healthcare mergers fail because leaders knowingly defer the hardest technical

The Biggest Risk in Healthcare M&A Isn’t Compliance It’s the Illusion of Operational Continuity. Compliance isn’t what breaks healthcare mergers. Believing you’re operationally stable does. Healthcare executives obsess over regulatory risk during mergers. HIPAA. HITRUST. Audit readiness. Policy alignment. Those risks are real.They are also rarely the reason a merger

The CIO’s Roadmap: From Day 1 Integration to AI-Ready Enterprise Eight weeks ago, we started with a simple premise: you can’t modernize what you haven’t consolidated. We’ve explored why the first 90 days define a CIO’s credibility. We’ve seen how specialists outperform giants in complex migrations. We’ve demonstrated that identity

Every CIO has the same modernization checklist: migrate to the cloud, implement Zero Trust, and harness AI for competitive advantage. Boards are demanding progress. Budgets are allocated. Projects are launched. Yet 70% of these initiatives stall, fail, or deliver disappointing results. The culprit isn’t the technology—it’s the foundation. Identity sprawl

Most organizations treat integration as the finish line Systems stay online, employees can authenticate, and operations continue without disruption. From the outside, it looks like success. The merger did not break anything. The lights stayed on.  But executives are not evaluating IT by stability. They are evaluating it by financial impact.

CIOs everywhere are racing toward modernization — cloud migration, Zero Trust, and AI transformation. The pressure is relentless. Boards want results. Budgets are already spent. But too many digital initiatives stall before they start, not because the technology is wrong, but because the foundation is fractured. The truth is simple:

Many CIOs already sense that consolidation is the smarter path. But when under pressure, they often postpone it and instead favor quick integrations or patch-work coexistence. That delay carries a steep, compounding tax that slowly erodes merger value, stiffens security, stalls cloud efforts, and frays culture.  In this post, we

When mergers happen, CIOs often brace for chaos: broken logins, system outages, staff frustration. But what if the dream outcome were possible instead? Imagine this: Domains consolidate without conflict or downtime  Systems integrate so smoothly you don’t notice the seams  Users from both sides of the merger collaborate immediately, on