It all looks good on paper, right? MegaBank Inc. acquires Local Savings Corp. Assets combine, redundant staff and technology services fall away, profits ensue, Wall Street approves.

But, oh, those details. As MegaBank's director of information technology, your task is to rapidly integrate two highly complex enterprise systems that will serve a combined 1,800 branches and 20 million customers. You'll need to do that on the breakneck one-year time line promised to investors. And you'll need to do that with a minimum of the service interruptions and inevitable customer attrition that lead to merger meltdown.

Where to start? The data centers, which hold all of the information on those valuable customers. Specifically, your challenge is to fully integrate the customer information systems (CIS) and data centers used by each bank. Pulling all of the data into a single CIS will allow the merged entity to continue to deliver or easily modify the dozens of "customer-facing" applications that use the data—ATM machines, teller applications, call centers, even the voice-activated phone banking system.

You'll need an experienced systems integrator to help you evaluate each bank's technology platform and map out the transition. Because Local Savings' highly customized Oracle-Unix platform is not significantly more advanced than your highly customized DB2-IBM platform, you'll stick with what you know. The integrator will also supervise the "conversion factory"—the dozens of programmers who will clean up and format the billions of lines of code that Local Savings' 5 million customers bring to your data center.

Also on your shopping list: a high-end hardware upgrade to support the additional load on your mainframe. Some application development will be required as well, but don't get too ambitious. Integration, not invention, is the rule on this do-or-die time line. Because in the end, "This project is as much of a business challenge as a technology challenge," says Sanjiv Das, who leads the banking and financial services team at New York-based TCS America.

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