Where data belongs in a 100-day plan after an acquisition

Why does a 100-day plan need a data workstream?#

A 100-day plan needs a data workstream because the first months after closing are when most history is lost. New owners consolidate vendors, finance cancels tools that look redundant, the founder's assistant who administered the CRM leaves, and an IT provider purges old mailboxes to cut license seats.

Standard plans already cover leadership, cash, reporting, pricing and IT security. Data usually appears only as a KPI dashboard. Adding a named workstream with an owner gives the company's records the same deliberate treatment as its bank accounts and insurance policies.

The data workstream template#

The data workstream template below runs in three phases inside the plan. Each phase ends with an output the operating partner can review at the regular check-in, so the workstream never depends on someone remembering to raise it.

What should the inventory capture for each system?#

The inventory should capture enough to make a decision without opening a single file. Fill one row per system, and keep the same columns across every company in the portfolio so rows can be compared later.

Write unknown where an answer is not yet known rather than guessing. Unknowns become the agenda for the Phase 2 rights work, and a column of unknowns under one system is itself a warning that its history may be at risk.

Rights and retention: the questions to settle early#

Rights and retention questions should be settled in Phase 2 because every later decision depends on them. Who owns the records, what the company promised about them and how long they must be kept determine whether a system can be retired and whether its history can ever be used beyond operations.

• 1Deal structure: did the buyer acquire the entity, or only listed assets and records?
• 2Customer and client contracts: confidentiality, ownership of deliverables and data use limits.
• 3Privacy notices and employee handbooks in force when the records were created.
• 4Vendor terms: export rights and what happens to data after termination.
• 5Litigation, warranty claims or audits that require a legal hold.
• 6Credit agreement covenants that touch IP licenses or asset transfers.
• 7The retention schedule finance and counsel agree for each record family.

Which systems to retire, and when#

Systems should be retired only after three conditions are met: a full export has been produced and opened, the retention and hold questions are answered, and the owner has signed the decision. The retirement list should carry each system's contract end date so notices of non-renewal are timed to the plan rather than to the vendor's billing cycle.

In a carve-out, add the transition services agreement end date to every row. Records that live in the seller's systems are only reachable while that agreement runs, so the export request belongs in Phase 1, not Phase 3.

Check built-in deletion timers during the Phase 1 freeze. Zoom lets account owners and admins turn on automatic deletion of cloud recordings after a set number of days. Microsoft Purview eDiscovery search exports expire 14 days after creation, so large exports must be downloaded on a schedule. Settings like these can erase history while the plan is still being written.

Running the value review inside the plan#

The value review is a short, metadata-only check of whether the company's records could support a data license to AI developers. It uses the inventory already built, adds a view on rights and privacy burden, and asks whether the history is deep, linked and human-written enough to matter.

The output is a one-page note with one of three recommendations: proceed to a fit check, park until a trigger such as a system migration, or revisit before exit. None of these commits the company to anything, and nothing leaves the company during the review.

Signals that point toward a fit check include several years of exportable history, records that link a request to a decision and an outcome, and rights notes with few restrictions. Signals that point toward parking include history lost in a past migration, records dominated by personal data or client deliverables, and no clear signer for the acquired entity. A recommendation to park is a normal result, not a failure of the plan.

Illustrative: an engineering firm's first 100 days under a new sponsor#

Illustrative: a fictional sponsor acquires a regional civil and structural engineering firm. In diligence, the deal team asks for the system list: Deltek Vantagepoint for projects and billing, Procore for construction administration, Bluebeam for markups, and a SharePoint library of QA and QC review comments.

In Phase 1 the controller secures admin access to Deltek after learning the only administrator plans to retire. In Phase 2 counsel finds that client agreements give clients ownership of final drawings, so deliverables are excluded, while internal review comments, RFI logs and submittal histories remain company records. The IT lead also finds that Zoom is set to delete cloud recordings after a fixed number of days and pauses the setting until design review recordings are inventoried. In Phase 3 an old on-premise file server is archived and retired, and the value review recommends a fit check focused on review comments linked to RFIs and their resolutions.

How SourceX fits the data workstream#

SourceX can take over at the end of Phase 3 if the value review recommends a fit check. The fit check is the start of the SourceX five-step transaction: Supply, Rights, Preparation, Approval and Delivery, and it collects metadata, not files.

The inventory and rights notes from the plan feed directly into the Supply and Rights steps, and the SourceX Enterprise Data Value Framework gives qualitative ratings on drivers such as uniqueness, domain expertise, recency, rights and privacy burden. If a license proceeds, the SourceX Evidence Packet records what was approved and why.