Pal Vankayalapati has been CIO at PLZ Corp since 2017, leading technology for a privately held specialty chemicals manufacturer that grows the way many mid-market companies do: by acquiring smaller ones. In the nine years since he joined, the company has completed eight acquisitions. Two more are in view. Each one carries the same question... how do you bring an acquired company's people onto your platform without breaking what they already know how to do?
The first integration taught him that the question was pointed at the wrong thing.
The System Is Not the Problem
When PLZ acquires a company, the acquired employees are already unsettled. They don't know whether their jobs are safe, whether their processes will survive, or whether corporate is coming to replace everything they've built over the past twenty years. Translating between the old platform and the new one, Pal says, is the manageable part. That can be mapped, documented, figured out.
What he underestimated the first time was the end user who wasn't in any of those technical conversations.
"The stakeholders are not the CEO, CFO," he said. "For me, the stakeholders are everybody who uses the system. If we don't get their buy-in, we can't do anything."
After that first integration, he changed the model. He now builds in an extra month before any rollout, dedicated to cultural exchange rather than technical preparation. He goes in assuming the acquired company's way of doing things has real value, and that his job is to understand that value before asking anyone to give it up.
The Four People Who Can Stop a Project
Inside most acquired companies, Pal has learned to find the four people who hold informal authority over how the rest of the organization responds to change. They are not always managers. They are the ones others look to when something is being imposed from outside.
On one integration, after identifying those four, he paired each of them with a corporate counterpart for one-on-one coaching over roughly a month. Not to convince them, but to build enough mutual understanding that they could evaluate the change on their own terms. Three came around. The fourth didn't.
So he brought the fourth person into the IT department.
"The one who was actually creating all the challenges, we moved them into our IT department," he said. "We acknowledged their knowledge, told them we needed their help, and asked them to come over and run the project."
It worked. The lesson he took from it: the person most resistant to an integration is often the one most deeply invested in how things currently work. That investment, redirected, becomes an asset.
"As soon as you can eliminate them versus us culture, you're the winner," he said. "If you don't bring it to a minimum, the projects don't go successful."
Promoting the Wrong Person
Building the internal team follows the same logic. Pal has twenty-six full-time employees and around fifteen on-demand consultants. When he looks to promote someone into management, technical skill is not the primary filter.
IT professionals, he notes, tend to be highly capable and strongly individual. They prefer to work without interference. That makes them valuable as contributors and often difficult to develop into managers.
"Technology is the easy one," he said. "The resource manager who can manage people, make it happen... those are the ones I look for."
He watches for how people communicate, whether they listen, whether they can bring others along without either dominating or disappearing. He does not need his managers to be the best technologists in the room. He needs them to build teams that produce outcomes.
After thirty-four years in IT, from a steel plant in India through SAP consulting at Deloitte to leading technology across a billion-dollar manufacturer, Pal Vankayalapati's read on what makes large programs succeed is consistent: the people furthest from the decision room usually determine the outcome.
"IT has to be the change," he said. "If we don't embrace the change, it's hard for the business people to change."