TomTom’s purchase of Tele Atlas – both global leaders in SatNav services and digital mapping – created a €1.5 billion giant whose products are used by more than 45 million people each day. Christiaan De Backer was appointed CIO of TomTom NV last year and tasked with integrating the IT operations and processes of the two companies. With activities spanning the globe, TomTom’s IT merger has involved a careful blend of the pragmatic and strategic. As the key phases have been completed, synergies have emerged that support both greater efficiency and stunning product advances.

The world of navigation and digital mapping is going through a wave of consolidation. Is driving value from TomTom’s acquisition of Tele Atlas in 2008 still top of your agenda?

I am happy to say that the restructuring of TomTom in 2009 has enabled us to start reaping the benefits of the acquisition. It has been a large scale project, though. Both companies were roughly the same employee size, which meant that TomTom’s employee base more than doubled to over 3,000.

After the acquisition, we transformed Tele Atlas into TomTom’s new Licensing business unit, and the IT department really focused on that integration. Over the past year the effort has centred on infrastructure integration. The standardisation of the basic infrastructure will be finished by the end of the year which will bring everybody onto the same platform and same support levels early next year. Meanwhile, the IT team – which is spread across seven different locations – is now running on the same processes and acting as one global team.

The next big challenge for us is the integration of the business applications and processes. And that process alignment will come about as moreof the company’s business units come together, integrate and globalise.

Cost optimisation is always a key part of such moves, but it is also an important requirement that our integration programmes support product development. For example,we needed to support the integration of the existing TomTom databank with the map creation group [of Tele Atlas]. This project will drive greater efficiency, higher quality and faster delivery of maps, which in turn feeds back into TomTom customers’ own devices.

Doing that kind of business integration means moving people around the organisation, and that has an immediate impact on your underlying systems. This is because, all of a sudden, you have business units with people who are paid out of different payroll systems, supported out of different financial systems and using two equally different salesforce automation systems. The moment you start to optimise your business from a process point of view and from an organisational point of view, you have an impact on your ERP systems.

The acquisition took almost a year to complete, so by the time it was finished there was a lot of pent-up demand for us to first support the product development and integration that the company had planned at that level. That meant the first IT issues were to implement things like good communication and email systems and to do a structured integration so that any application was accessible from any site in the world across both companies. We could have come up with an argument that said we had to implement the HR or the finance system immediately, but that was not the business priority at that time.

What has been the result of those efforts to innovate across the
 two organisations?

We use data in highly sophisticated ways. We receive very granular data from mobile providers [the “pings” sent out by phones to locate their position relative to communication masts]. That shows how millions of mobile phones are moving within their networks.

Based on that, combined with other sources, we can calculate the traffic speeds and movement on all roads covered. We see the location and movement data of every single mobile, completely anonymously of course. This means we can calculate the speed [of traffic] and send that information every three minutes to TomTom devices that have a subscription to our live services. The user can then base their route on the live data.

Another thing we are doing is asking our TomTom users to share their route data with us. Based on that information, we can calculate the historical speed-flow times on specific roads at certain times of the day, and the average speed on a particular day and date in a particular segment of the street.

What does that detailed level of customer SatNav data show you?

If you want to make a particular journey, should you use the same roads on a Sunday evening as you would on a Monday morning? Not if you have local knowledge of traffic movement on those roads. We offer our customers the possibility to “Drive Like a Local”. A local person knows which routes he or she has to take at different times and on specific days. During the night or on Sunday morning, it is going to be completely different from travelling on a Monday morning.

We can also build new products and enhance existing ones based on that information. It allows us to see where new roads are becoming available and used, whether they are one-way streets (as shown by the direction of the traffic), which turns are allowed, and so on, and we can build that information directly into our maps. We can even detect where there are speed bumps. It is all about pattern recognition.

Beyond the product side, has the merger provided an opportunity to redefine and enhance key business processes?

Yes. We have been very pragmatic in this arena, in that we want to take the most mature environments from both companies and implement them – with minimal optimisation of the processes to deal with local differences or specific business unit requirements. We can identify where the highest maturity [of a process] exists and that becomes our starting point to become even better.

So you are now deeply into the application integration phase?

Now that we have decided which applications we want to integrate, we want to move very quickly: we have rolled out a new group intranet this summer; and a new HR system, which will manage all of our people worldwide for the first time, went live in September. And we are now preparing our strategy and plans for integrating the financial systems.

We felt we had to integrate the IT organisation completely before we could start to bring the business applications together. Until that point you can’t start to debate the best solutions. It is much more difficult to have those debates when you have two IT organisations of roughly the same size and with strengths of experience on both sides. You have to create an environment where both groups of people come up with the best solutions for the company.

Could cloud-based services be used to make M&A much easier?

For me, cloud computing is a sourcing discussion and just one of a number of sourcing alternatives. You want to do that when you have an issue with costs or quality or agility – and have a strong business case to support that move.

At this point, though, I have trouble with a lot of cloud vendors who portray cloud as the new Holy Grail. It will solve particular issues, and really save a lot of money for specific problems, but vendors need to stop generalising the benefits while ignoring the issues that we all know still exist. So make sure you adopt cloud for the right reasons and the right application.