A Case for 'Forensic Data Profiling' in M&A Due Diligence

• Case
• M&A Due Diligence
• Goal:  Company A acquiring Company B to create an organization with substantially larger market share
• Reality:  The merged Company AB had substantially smaller than forecasted market share due to overlapping customer base and product set - resulting in a substitutionary rather than a complementary outcome
• Hypothesis:  Company A could have avoided this outcome if they had engaged in 'Forensic Data Profiling' practices to validate their investment thesis
• Opportunity
• Information Management firms should leverage opportunistic & context driven initiatives to offer variations of their services rather than engage in programs/initiatives within a data domain context
• Doing so mitigates the need for creating a business case since a compelling case already exists and is funded
• What does this 'Forensic Data Profiling' service offering entail?
• Build of a due diligence data warehouse (DW) to answer the following questions
• Clients
• Who are the customers of Company A and Company B?
• What are overlaps in customers?
• Products
• Who are the products that Company A and Company B offer?
• What are overlaps in products?
• Predictive models
• Which customers are likely to defect from the merged entity?
• Of these potential defectors, which are high quality customers that should be induced to stay via special outreach/incentives?
• Reverse of above point
• What product sets should be kept and which should be retired from the lineup of the merged entity?
• How does this differ from a typical data profiling exercise?
• Not focused purely on Data Quality (DQ) though DQ issues encountered will be remediated if it impacts the core objectives and highlighted but deferred should it be a secondary issue
• Not focused on architectural implications as primary objective
• Data sources and targets will be identified over the course of the DW design/build
• Architectural rationalization not the main focus