IT Administrator.
UNIQA CZ
After the AXA + UNIQA merger I was one of the bridges between the old and the new infrastructure — integrating systems and keeping the day-to-day running.
ARCHIVEI walked into UNIQA right into a merger — AXA and UNIQA were combining and both sides needed someone who had seen the other half. My previous role at AXA made that someone me for a while.
What an IT merger actually involves
On paper merging two large companies looks like a financial operation. In IT it looks like a decade of decisions from both sides overlapping — duplicate systems, overlapping tools, different access policies, different security standards. Most days on that kind of project are small adjustments: who gets access to what, which account to move, which system to keep, which to shut down.
The day-to-day
- Keeping systems running and up-to-date — classic run-the-bank stuff. Updates, monitoring, oversight.
- Working with other departments — HR, compliance, business. Each one had a different idea of what “merger done” meant.
- Putting out whatever was on fire — things broke without warning. Figuring out why and restoring service was a daily routine, not an exception.
What I took from it
Mergers are not pretty, but they are a great school of patience. And a school of the fact that in IT, change is accepted at the pace people accept it — not at the pace the technology allows. Decisions about which system stays and which goes were often political, not technical. I learned to understand the motivations on both sides before I started troubleshooting systems.