When Jim McGrane learned in August 2001 that he would be CIO of the soon-to-be-formed MeadWestvaco Corp.?the result of the merger the following January between paper and packaging players Mead and Westvaco?his first thoughts weren’t about org charts, dueling data centers, different e-mail standards, headcount reduction or even the fact that he’d never held the title of CIO before.

No, McGrane’s first thoughts were about agility...responsiveness...dynamism. In other words, change management writ large.

He’d have to tackle all those other issues, and more, before his first year was out. But from the outset in this merger of equals, McGrane was intent on not simply choosing the best of two cultures and systems, but in forging a third way. The similarity of Mead and Westvaco in revenue, numbers of employees, market capitalization and IT sophistication?and the absence of the two entities’ previous CIOs, who stepped down or moved on?meant that McGrane had a freer hand than most executives in M&A situations.

"I saw the merger as an opportunity to get new ideas in," he says. "With no one side having ultimate leverage over the other, it was the perfect environment to introduce new concepts," namely, to transform IT from several operations-focused organizations to a coherent group able to drive competitive advantage and sustain change over a long period of time.

But if McGrane was going to introduce this kind of mind-set shift, he’d have to work fast?and accomplish it amid an atmosphere of relocations, executive departures, plant closings and massive layoffs. "We had laid out a very aggressive time line, 90 days," he recalls, "which meant we had to go forward organizationally at the same time we were getting on the same page with a shared vision."

Fast-Track Change

McGrane came from the Mead side of the merger, having overseen the company’s ERP implementation as vice president of business process development. With one company’s CIO ready to retire and the other’s moving deeper into the packaging end of the industry, McGrane found himself with a new title, CIO, just four months before the merger took effect in January 2002, and a long list of action items to accomplish.

McGrane had to decide on technology standards, the number of data centers and so on. But more pressing in his mind was the task of combining what were essentially four separate technology cultures?two at each company, in ERP and in IT?into a single organization with a shared vision, objectives for the integration period, and a common strategic plan for IT in the first year of the new company and beyond.