Data Migration

What is a Data Migration?

A data migration is a complex and delicate operation, typically linked to the adoption of a new system or technology by an organization, which aims to transport data between information systems.

This type of project is quite peculiar since it involves a significant set of human, technical and technological resources that work together, often with an overload of effort, such as a shared server migration, lack of documentation of the source system or the accumulation of the migration project with the daily tasks of the teams involved.

It is easy to understand that these situations pose a significant set of challenges to the data migration project that can lead to complex problems. Thus, it is essential to have the support of experienced professionals who bring good practices and good extraction, transformation and loading tools, commonly referred to as ETL, in order to eliminate or mitigate problems.

Typical Scenario

An organization wishes to adopt an information system more suitable for its business ambitions.
A new information system is selected and a set of teams are assigned to several tasks, all with the same goal: to replace the current system with the new system. The teams aim to the same target but have different responsibilities. Some will have to configure the new system, some will have to redefine and update the processes, some will have to train the people in the new system and, of course, some will have to move the business data from the current systems into the new system.

No matter the metric, time, resources or money, this is an obvious expensive project for the organization and failing will bring additional very expensive costs.

Typical Mistakes

It is a common mistake to think that in-house people can perform the data migration with some SQL scripts, an extract-load tool and some special purpose computer programs for the more complex transformation rules. This is a mistake for obvious reasons such as the impossibility to audit the transformation rules by non-technical people, overhead from technical coordination due to rule dependencies and non-accurate data migration progress data for management to work with.

This common mistakes are sometimes discovered too late in order to comply with the organization migration planing and established dead-line. Failing with the organization migration plan also means an increase of costs and unhappy shareholders.

Data Migration Done Right

In order to do a data migration the right way, a specialist team on the subject should be called into play. This team will help and guide the organization through all the data migration steps and procedures making it a success.

It will start by talking with the people responsible with the current and the new systems in order to gather data and knowledge about the business rules complexity and first gaps.
It is common to perform a proof of concept data migration using a small and simple business area. For this purpose, usually clients are selected since the model does not differ much across systems.
The common data migration specialists task and responsibilities lie in:

• work with the management team in the project planning, the migration strategy definition and assist it by providing accurate management report metrics;
• work in detail with the business and functional teams in the definition of the mapping rules, gap identification and in breaking the complex business rules into understandable transformation rules;
• work close with the technical teams to define the data extraction, transformation and loading processes;
• assist the testing team to set up its testing strategy;
• provide auditors with non-technical understandable mapping rules definition;
• and finally, it will alert the sponsor before things start to go wrong, and things will tend to go wrong on this special kind of complex project.

Hexónio understands Data Migrations

Hexónio is used to this very specific kind of IT project.
In fact, we are comfortable with it.
We've done it many times, always with success. We always use our data migration tool - Data Fusion.

Do you have a new challenge for us? Get in touch.

If you wish to know more, check out our blog articles about Data Migration.

1. ADAM stands for Advanced Method for DAta Migration and is a methodology developed since 2002 by several data migration specialists from the IT industry and the scientific community. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Hexónio founder, is one of the original ADAM developers and still participates actively on its enhancements. Though there are several publications that resulted from ADAM scientific research, ADAM itself is currently an unpublished work.
2.For regular tables and medium complex transformation rules.