Cognitive M&A – Leveraging Cognitive Search & Analytics for Successful Mergers and Acquisitions

Mergers and acquisitions provide one avenue for organizations to grow via synergistic gains, strategic positioning and diversification. Even with an abundance of M&A activity, mergers tend to fail at the business process and information integration levels. The success of a merger can be greatly enhanced when business processes are integrated and information is seamlessly unified by gathering it from both organizations, analyzing it, establishing clusters of semantically similar information, and finding common patterns. Cognitive search & analytics platforms provide the necessary capabilities to accomplish all of this, thereby helping facilitate merger and acquisition initiatives and significantly increasing the odds of success.

Anatomy of a Successful Merger

Let’s envision the details of how this impacts the relevant stakeholders. At the outset, a cognitive search & analytics platform provides the organization with unified access to information from both organizations and beyond. Users can leverage out of the box machine learning algorithms to explore and navigate this information.

For example, the Clustering algorithm groups documents into topically-related clusters by analyzing the content and metadata. This is very useful for topical navigation and helps stakeholders identify similar documents based on named entities within the content.

Automated classification is another useful technique for unifying information and improving navigability. In certain circumstances such as when classification rules do not exist but a properly classified sample set of content does, a Classification by Example algorithm can automatically create a model from the sample set, which can subsequently be applied across the combined set of content from both organizations to further enhance findability for stakeholders.

Machine learning algorithms can also help match experts with other experts as well as relevant documents across the consolidating organizations. This is done dynamically by analyzing what people write and collaborate around to compute user profiles, which are subsequently analyzed to compute “peer groups” that connect stakeholders with similar interests and expertise across the consolidating enterprise.

With these peer groups established, experts can be more effectively presented with relevant content using a collaborative filtering technique that compares preferred content across the peer group and surfaces valuable content to members of the peer group who have not previously been exposed to it.

As you can see, a cognitive search & analytics solution facilitates smart information sharing across the consolidating enterprise. Usually a lack of sophisticated security controls impedes greater openness between consolidating entities. A search-based application, however, respects existing security profiles—making it easier to merge infrastructures securely.

A cognitive search & analytics solution also helps to identify areas of risk and to solve outstanding issues before financial consequences occur. For example, risks could include content containing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or content with no security associated. This is done by employing text-mining agents (TMAs), which provide out-of-the-box rules-based capabilities to extract elements from unstructured text.

TMAs can be configured to incorporate terms and phrases specific to any part of the business. A cognitive search & analytics solution enables a quick, seamless and successful consolidation of organizations. Typically, in a large enterprise this is done as a series of search-based applications (SBAs) that each pull from a Logical Data Warehouse (LDW), which is essentially central cache of unified information. In the next sections, we will look at specific areas of the business that typically benefit the most from this approach.

Sales and Marketing

Once consolidation is underway, the organization must move quickly to combine sales and marketing activities, sales methodologies, pipelines and channels to drive revenue in the field and promote up-selling and cross-selling into new and existing market segments. The organization wants to minimize any potential lapse in the sales cycle for the newly merged company.

A cognitive search & analytics solution immediately equips sales teams with a single global access point to relevant, real-time and insightful information on products and customers—sales and customer notes, sales processes, product information and sales training are all immediately accessible. As previously mentioned, this is typically done using a dedicated search-based application (SBA).

An SBA for Sales and Marketing could provide unified access to the separate CRM systems and allow for the addition of shared content. As a result, no sales note, customer quirk or prospect is lost during consolidation. An SBA also offers the ability to push alerts and notifications out to users. As sales representatives learn about new products.

The SBA provides unified access to new marketing materials, sales process documentation, research documents and news articles to assist in training and ensures that they are effectively representing the newly expanded product line. Often when a merger occurs, customers know more about the products from the other company than the sales reps. With a cognitive search & analytics solution in place, an empowered and unified sales team can competently sell the acquired products and services.

Finance, Accounting and Human Resources

Finance, accounting and human resources are other key departments that need to be unified. A dedicated SBA provides a complete and consolidated access to information from the disparate ERP systems.

A cognitive search & analytics solution provides administrators and content curators with the visibility across the enterprise necessary to manage all documentation from both parties related to the merger effectively and securely.

Multiple IT systems and finance systems always increase the complexity of a merger. Organizations acquiring a large IT infrastructure need to identify the systems acquired and the value of the data in these systems.

A cognitive search & analytics solution enables the required visibility and helps to expose any redundant or unused systems that might be eliminated. For example, a cognitive search & analytics solution can be used to monitor and analyze usage of underlying repositories and applications to show what sources are being used less frequently.

Some organizations have even been able to standardize and eliminate the need for multiple search applications. In other cases, a cognitive search & analytics solution works as a stop gap providing access to legacy systems that should be migrated, thereby reducing the cost of forcing an immediate migration.

Organizations can leverage Sinequa’s scalable platform as the cognitive search & analytics solution to connect information across the consolidating enterprise by leveraging previously mentioned machine learning algorithms like Clustering, Classification by Example, etc. as well as more traditional rules-based enrichment techniques.

This helps the organization deliver unified access to stakeholders, ensure accuracy, reduce risk and gain insight into the complex systems across all affected departments. Enterprise Application Integration is usually a multi-year project. While cognitive search & analytics solutions do not replace such an integration, they provide comprehensive visibility in a very short time.

Research and Development

The cost of R&D increases when multiple teams unknowingly work on solutions to the same problems or fail to recognize and utilize the work done in past research. Cognitive search & analytics solutions positively impact R&D by accurately combining research data from the consolidating organizations, giving users real-time access and reducing the duplication of content, efforts, and sometimes entire projects. They do this by connecting experts working in the same subject area.

Sometimes a key driver in a merger or acquisition is gaining access to intellectual property, which often includes the expertise of the other organization’s knowledge workers. Sinequa’s Find the Expert capability gives employees from each organization the ability to discover the most knowledgeable people on a variety of topics, to view their profiles and to find associated information. This accelerates R&D discovery by enabling users to navigate information in clusters—leveraging the machine learning algorithm—and by content refinements.

These tools enable users to find past research and hidden relationships – including relationships with external experts with whom both companies have collaborated in the past – that would have otherwise been missed, thereby increasing speed-to-market.

The organization is also able to gain greater market share by leveraging and optimizing the information acquired instead of simply discarding projects in progress. One of the key drivers in a merger is the ability to retain and share as much knowledge as possible.

Sinequa’s collaborative features spawn greater innovation in the newly expanded R&D department in the form of capabilities such as tagging, bookmarking and automatic feedback loops. For example, a scientist can comment on an old publication and explain how it relates to new research, which subsequently increases go-to-market speed by enabling broader collaboration.

How Cognitive Search Works

Sinequa has developed an innovative and simple-to-use Cognitive Search and Analytics platform that offers Unified Information Access (i.e. information from any source, in any format, whether structured or unstructured, internal or external, through a single platform and user interface) to respond to even the most difficult information access challenges of large companies and organizations. The solution is composed of three main components:

• A powerful (natural language) analytics platform that gives structure to the most unstructured content. The analysis and indexing of data solve typical enterprise challenges involving multiple sources, unstructured and structured content, multiple languages, high data volume and high update frequencies.
• Simple and intuitive user interface that brings simplicity to complex search and analytics. Sinequa’s out-of-the-box user interface leverages the familiarity of common search tools enhanced with faceted search tools (i.e. filters) and analytics, giving the user an immediate picture of the information available from all enterprise sources. The UI is easily customizable to reflect specific appearance and navigation goals as well as corporate standards/branding, and is extensible, allowing third-party or custom UIs to be easily integrated via a provided search API (Application Programming Interface).
• A powerful, open and scalable technical architecture (GRID). Sinequa’s highly-scalable architecture was designed from the ground up to support multiple search needs starting on a single server cluster, providing a cost-effective solution that allows companies to respond to multiple business needs now and in the future with minimal hardware investment (whether the application is deployed on premise or in a private cloud). The architecture is distributed and modular to support virtually any data source addition and growth, often without any additional infrastructure investment.

Leveraging these combined components from within the Sinequa platform has proven to accelerate the integration of business processes and to amplify the expertise of the whole by seamlessly and securely unifying disparate information from each organization involved in a merger or acquisition.