The purpose of the IT due diligence assessment is to provide a high-level view of the targeted IT operation. The due diligence process typically considers the following aspects:

Strategy (Business and IT Strategies and Alignment between the two)

Finance (IT Budgets, Asset Management, Financial Control)

People (IT Organisation, Skills and Key Dependencies)

Technology (Systems Environment and IT Infrastructure)

Process (Business Processes, IT Governance, Management Practices)

Security (Data Management, Disaster Recovery Planning)

Partners (Supplier Contracts, Support and Maintenance Arrangements, SLA’s, Software Licensing)

Compliance (Legislation Compliance, Corporate Social Responsibility, Intellectual Property, Supplier Warranties, Green-IT)

The above process, which typically takes 2-4 weeks in duration, is designed with existing best practices in mind, those that you typically would expect from the Big-4 consulting firms. Examples of the type of questions that you would expect in this process are:

• Does a relevant IT strategy exist? How effective are the IT budgeting and expenditure processes? How realistic are the plans and budgets? How current is the IT asset register?

• Is there a business continuity and disaster recovery strategy in place? Are there any key dependencies on particular individuals? What mitigation steps have been taken?

• Are there any major system replacement planned? How credible are the expenditure forecasts? Is the current IT infrastructure scalable and capable of supporting business growth? How resilient is the current hardware and networks? Are there any technical single points of failure?

• What are the current contractual arrangements with 3rd party suppliers? Are there appropriate support and maintenance contracts in place? Are there effective service level agreements in place?

Some examples:

• Leading UK Bank Equity Investment - Carried out M&A IT Due Diligence for a secondary MBO of a medium size group (£300 million) of international companies in the manufacturing sector. The exercise included business processes, major ERP Roll-out implementation assessment, IT strategy, plans, budgets, IT infrastructure and IT organisation.

• Big 4 Bank Equity Investment - Carried out M&A IT Due Diligence for a secondary MBO of medium size company (£120 million) in the chemical sector. The exercise included business processes, current ERP assessment, IT strategy, plans, budgets, IT infrastructure and IT organisation.

• Big 4 Bank Equity Investment - Carried out M&A IT Due Diligence for a MBO of a medium size company (£189 million) in the manufacturing sector. The exercise included business processes, current systems, IT strategy, plans, budgets, IT infrastructure and IT organisation.

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