Let the fun my company's going through right now be a lesson to you all... if you're going to have multiple companies come together under a single "tech umbrella", do what it takes to merge your IT departments early.
About a year or so back, we acquired another company, placing both our current company and the new company under a single parent company... the intent being that IT and Accounting (at a minimum) would be moved to the parent, saving costs and/or improving reliability in the process. The problem is, that consolidation never happened. However, since there was still value to be had in sharing some systems, our department arranged with their department to install some software on their servers... and all was well, for a time.
About four months back, as a cost-cutting measure, their company laid off their last IT guy. Now, my background is more Unix/Linux, and they're a Windows shop, but I could have stepped in to start learning how they're set up to operate... especially on those "shared" systems... but they declined our help. Maybe they thought their IT layoff would be a momentary thing, or whatever... but it hardly matters now.
Today, they attempted to upgrade a server component for one of those shared services we use... it was expected to be about a half-hour downtime, which would have been tolerable. However, they neglected to let us know beforehand (a moderate sin in and of itself)... and they ran into problems severe enough that the system has been down all day (a system both of our companies now depend on to get any work done) while the vendor tries to bring it back to life.
Had they brought us into the loop earlier, I might be able to provide some useful insight into what's going wrong where... as is, I can only sit and stew while the tragedy plays out. Oh well, here's hoping things are working again for tomorrow... and here's hoping that this serves as a wake-up call for our sister company.
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