I’ve said often that the dreaded four words that start any user / implementer conversation after a major system replacement are “In the old system…. ” I found that as hard as I’d worked to capture the specifics and nuances of the application I was replacing, we missed a bunch of things. It’s one of the reasons I’m not so fond of RFP’s. There’s a load of detail that often misses the overall picture, sort of a forest vs. the trees thing. It’s also one of the reasons I never made use of “vendor landscapes ” in a system selection process. So much of retail is idiosyncratic – and you just can’t see the nuance from 40,000 feet.

Now obviously there are many similarities across companies and tech offerings (especially in retail) have matured to the point where they can accommodate many types of products, formats, and channel offerings. And in an era of seemingly endless mergers and acquisitions, for the most part, vendors have been careful to make sure they don’t sunset one product before dotting I’s and crossing T’s on functionality in the surviving product.

But sometimes, and in some industries, this just doesn’t happen. And we’re not immune. We’ve been zapped! RSR uses five or six different software applications to run our front and back office businesses. I know, in many ways, “that just ain’t no thang ” as Steve Rowen would say, but it turns out it’s a big thing. We’ve been burned before, but it has happened again. When one of our core vendors was bought by another, and we were migrated to the new vendor’s application, we had some seriously rude shocks. We’ll get over it. There’s still enough competition in the world that we’ll change vendors if we have to. But I found myself on the other side of the table. In a conference call with the other company’s Customer Service Department last week I heard myself starting almost every sentence with those same four words, “In the old system… ” This could just be weird Karma, or perhaps, I thought, it might be useful to pass along to our readers, both on the vendor side and the user side.

So I present to you here, “Worst Practices in M&A System Migration: “

1. Don’t solicit input from your customers/clients on the features that they use most often. After all, you won the war. Just look at it yourselves and decide what’s important and what isn’t.
2. Pick an arbitrary date for the cut-over. It doesn’t matter how much information you’ve gathered, just pick a date.
3. Assume your customers are tech novices. There’s nothing quite so special to a bunch of tech geeks as to be patronizingly reminded “Now, when you first download the file, it will have a yellow border saying ‘Editing is disabled. You’ll need to enable editing.’ ” Can you just feel my blood boiling? Or smell the burnt hairs on my head after this particular lesson?
4. Promise you’ll put needed features back into the application, but at an as yet undetermined date. Don’t give any indication of how or even if anything has been prioritized. Just ask the client to “trust you. “
5. Make sure that there’s no way back if the system is really a bust. Yup. Even though most of the clients have complained that the new system is inadequate, just stonewall. There’s no going back, because you’ve already built pro-forma elimination of redundancy into your new business model.
6. Finally, keep supervisory personnel unavailable. My special favorite. Early on, a client can recognize when they’re working with level 1 tech support. So when that client asks to talk with someone who can actually make a decision, make sure no one is available. Just keep them at level 1 or level 2, preferably with someone who sounds 22 and knows how to talk in soothing tones.

The above list is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and I know most of you involved in technology know better than to do any of it. But you can never be sure. The last thing you want is a user like me engaging with your CSR’s. It’s cruel for everyone concerned. Those of you on the user side, demand to see what the new system will look like, and actually take the time to work through all its functions. My only regret around our personal saga is that I really only looked at the UI. I never got deeper into how the thing was actually going to process data. Perhaps I could have shaken this vendor out of his fog of denial before the cut over and maybe even made a difference.

Those of you who remember me from my CIO days will remember I was never an easy client. I should have kept those skills! I wholeheartedly recommend you keep a few people around with those same skills.