GE Money's bid was successful. By the end of May 2002, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) formally approved the purchase of AGC from Westpac. But the IT terms of the agreement the two companies entered into were a most unusual arrangement. When presenting GE Money with the data for the due diligence, a representative from the Westpac team crafted what Felstead calls a "transitional services agreement", which allowed GE to have Westpac System Services operate AGC's IT shop for as long as it took to complete the integration. In other words, day-to-day systems continued to be operated by Westpac.

"I had responsibility for treating AGC's day-to-day systems as if they were my own," Felstead says. "But Simon's team had the rather bizarre responsibility of being accountable for running those systems for me."

Often, a CIO whose company acquires another is forced to wear "two hats" during the integration period (see "IT As an Enabler of Post Merger Integration", page 34). Felstead, on the other hand, relied on the assistance of Westpac Group CIO McNamara to ensure the transition went smoothly and did not interrupt either company's existing business.

AGC's systems and applications were closely interwoven into the architecture of the Westpac Group as a whole. Transferring the vast amounts of client data to GE's own systems while keeping AGC's day-to-day business operating uninterrupted - and doing it securely, without compromising customers' privacy - posed a tremendous challenge. In the end, it was agreed that Westpac would operate the new business's systems on GE Money's behalf for as long as it took to migrate them away from Westpac. "I think there was a certain sadness on the part of the Westpac people who were saying goodbye to their systems, but everybody knew what their organization wanted. Success for us was to get everything out of Westpac. And success for Westpac was to get everything out of there," Felstead says.

Business as (Un)Usual

Felstead and McNamara claim that what made the integration of the two companies' systems such a challenge was the need to keep AGC running in "business-as-usual" mode while heavy-duty migration efforts were happening behind the scenes to remove the systems to GE Money.

And what a migration it was. All told, GE Money's integration strategy encompassed 38 separate projects, including 20 application streams. "And when I say 'application streams' I'm talking about major ones like the sales/finance product, the MasterCard portfolio and all the things that go with them: Web front ends, credit scoring and a debenture system," Felstead says.

It was an immensely complex project, one involving several large commercial products and the underlying architecture that tied them all together - virtually none of which conformed to the kind of systems that GE was using. "And of course, we had no vendors in common," Felstead says. "That was a challenge."

"There was quite a significant number of moving parts, and the success of this piece of work is the way those moving parts worked together when there was considerable potential for them to work at odds to each other," adds Westpac's McNamara.

McNamara is quick to point out that the "moving parts" he's talking about are not strictly technological. He is referring to the human capital it took get the job done, the team of about 250 staff from GE Money and Westpac (plus scores of contracted help from vendors like IBM GSA and Telstra) that put in long hours and gave up their weekends to take the newly-migrated systems through test runs outside regular business hours.

"Both organizations had to work very closely together and they did it well. I think that's one of the key characteristics that helped make this very successful," McNamara says. "This was a complex task, conducted very skilfully by some very competent technicians."