MetLife, an insurance company, spent $11 billion to acquire Travelers Life and Annuity from Citicorp in one of the largest insurance company acquisitions of all time. The Metlife CIO estimated it would take three years to integrate the two systems. Because the integration project was especially critical, he figured he could accomplish the integration in 18 months if he pulled out all the stops. The MetLife CEO gave him nine months to complete the task. To pull off the integration in nine months, he had to:
• Integrate over 600 IS applications, all with their own infrastructure and business processes. The new systems had to comply with “One MetLife,” a company policy that all information systems had to have a common look and feel companywide and be able to function seamlessly with other MetLife systems.
• Work with over 4,000 employees located in 88 offices scattered all over the globe.
• Supervise an oversight team and 50 integration teams in seven project management offices.
• Work with hostile, uncooperative Travelers employees for the six months it took to get regulatory approval and close the deal. The systems had to be integrated three months after the deal closed.
• Identify integration deliverables (144 in total) and manage the process to deliver them.
• Negotiate with Citicorp for hundreds of transition services that would not be immediately converted to MetLife’s systems

Required
a. What tasks would MetLife have to perform to integrate the Traveler systems into MetLife’s?
b. Search the Internet for articles that describe the integration process. Write a two-page summary of the problems and successes that MetLife experienced while integrating the two systems.