IT carve-out projects are complex and cost-intensive components of M&A transactions. Existing research sheds little light on the determinants of IT carve-out project complexity and/or its effects on divestor performance. Instead, research has focused on the post-acquisition IT integration project and acquirer performance. This paper presents the first divestor-centric model of IT transactions from the divestor to the acquirer when a Business Unit in a Multi-Business Organization (MBO) is carved out and integrated into another MBO. The model explains how divestor business and IT alignment pre-conditions contribute to increased IT carve-out project complexity. Such complexity increases IT carve-out project time to physical IT separation and creates IT stranded assets, which decrease post-divestment business, IT alignment and divestor performance. The current recommended strategy of adopting transitional service agreements (TSAs) to handle IT carve-out complexity is compared with two new proactive strategies derived from the model. TSA-based strategies restrict the divestor from both decommissioning IT stranded assets and reconfiguring its IT assets to support its new post-divestment business strategy. The two new strategies address IT carve-out complexity without incurring the negative effects from adopting TSAs.

This paper conceptualises the COVID-19 pandemic as a “rare event.” Rare events channel managerial attention to magnified issues and foster resource mobilisation and learning. We draw on a case study of a US consumer lender to develop a model explaining how organisations actualise digital affordances as part of their rare event response and, in doing so, leverage the transformative experience towards establishing a “new normal.” The model and its instantiation contribute conceptual understanding and advice for how IS managers may effectively address rare events and, in particular, the COVID-19 pandemic, including the aftermath of its lockdown and the transition to the new business status quo. The model emphasises the importance of understanding the evolution of digital affordances as possessing teleological paths where affordances are developed in steps corresponding to where an organisation focuses its managerial attention, with indirect consequences of possibilities to attend to other objectives enabled by digital technologies. Overall, the model contributes to theory by explaining the role of rare events in the evolution of affordances, including some that can be transformative and introducing the rare events literature into the IS discipline.

This paper develops a knowledge-based model of information systems (IS) integration in acquisition-based growth programs. Previous research has found important differences in the acquirers’ abilities for acquisition IS integration, and that these differences play key roles in explaining the economic benefits of acquisition-based growth. A knowledge-based view of acquisition IS integration contributes explanation to how differences in abilities arise. Our knowledge-based model is developed by an analytic induction approach, comprising both deductive and inductive analysis of the industry group Trelleborg. The analyses yield five propositions that explain the building of knowledge for acquisition IS integration by the mechanisms of routine refinement, superstitious learning, expertise building, sub-activity refinement and related expertise building. Together, the five propositions form a knowledge-based model of acquisition IS integration. The model suggests that ‘serial acquirers’ form the knowledge necessary for attending to an IS integration challenge over a series of heterogeneous acquisitions. Differences in acquirers’ abilities for acquisition IS integration that depend on knowledge variations are therefore persistent and hard to overcome for the inexperienced acquirer.