A diversified manufacturer is several companies wearing one logo, and after two acquisitions it is several more. The engagement ran the length of that problem: assessments of the business units and the data centers, automated discovery and network assurance across the estate, an enterprise architecture review, and the integration work across both acquisitions.
Discovery before opinion
The automated discovery is the part that changes the character of an assessment. An estate assembled by acquisition has documentation describing three different companies’ intentions at three different times, and the gap between that and the running network is where every integration surprise lives. Deriving the current state from the network itself rather than from the drawings is what makes the integration plan worth anything.
Which is the same discipline as any honest assessment: establish what the estate actually is before saying what it should become. Post-merger integration is also the clearest commercial case for the architecture-by-influence practice — nobody in an acquired business unit reports to the architect setting the target state, and the standard still has to be adopted.
Outcome
A current-state picture derived from the network itself rather than from documentation, and an integration plan built on it.