Modern organisations are thick with data, but where is
the best data these enterprises have to offer? Where is the most
appropriate, the most up-to-date and the most accurate data? How do
we create a representation of the business world that users find
recognisable?
John Morris, author of the BCS book Practical Data Migration,
was prompted to ask questions like these when he first got involved
with data migration 10 years ago. In his book he has tried to offer
techniques and strategies for ensuring that data migration projects
achieve maximum return on investment.
Talking from past experiences he said, “We had gone through the
painful process of building a migration tool, stocking it with
extracts taken from the most legitimate source available (a rather
cranky old database created for regulatory purposes), only to find
it all rejected out of hand by our user population.”
It turned out that each set of users had, out of exasperation or
necessity, created a separate store of the data items they needed
to do their work. Of course, each store was built to a different
format and standard. Some were in Excel, some were bastardised
versions of a data-gathering Access database that had been left
behind from a previous migration exercise. Some were in
non-standard database formats using tools officially superseded a
couple of desktop versions ago.
To the technologists these stores represented the worst possible
nightmare of design and build aberration. To the users they were
the best fit to their needs and, being closer to the coalface of
day-to-day activity, they were also the best matches to external
reality.
“We were faced with the classic migration dilemma: stick to the
official policy and use the discredited corporate data store, or
listen to our users and use the best of what they had to offer,”
said Morris.
The latter course was chosen, entailing considerable additional
effort. Each data store had to be examined for quality and rejigged
to fit the new data structure. Extracts had to be hand-coded or
even re-keyed. However, once the project was allowed be led by the
business it became a shared problem.
The question now became, “How are we (the business) going to
preserve the best of our data and add value to it by enhancing its
quality, as we load it into the new tool?”
From this Morris learned the most important rule of successful
data migrations: to guarantee success, data migration has to become
a business problem, not a technical one.
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www.bcs.org/membership
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