Opinion: who’s afraid of the big bad M word?

Migration continues to strike fear into the hearts of IT professionals. So why does it have such a scary reputation - and how can these fears be overcome?

By Steve Tuck, Datanomic Ltd

Migration – you’d be forgiven for thinking that moving data from one application to another was such a common task for the IT department today that they could do it in their sleep. Why is it then, that, in a survey conducted by Celona Technologies, 95 percent of IT professionals said that they fear migrations?

Our businesses have to evolve constantly to face new market dynamics, so it’s critical that the enterprise applications we use to support the business can evolve and adapt too. We no longer rely on the monolithic computer systems of the 20th century. Instead, we have a heterogeneous collection of software applications, each of which is (in theory at least) replaceable, whether the replacement is a newer version of the same application or an equivalent product from a competing vendor. If the IT department is afraid of migrating, should we be too?

The majority of the 212 respondents to the Celona survey were drawn from the Telemanagement World Exhibition in Nice earlier this year. With responses from 24 different countries, the survey provides a valuable insight into the things that keep the CIO awake at night.

The fear of delivering late or failing to get all of the data migrated were each cited as a worry by more than a third of those involved in the survey. That’s bad enough, but if you’re about to embark on a migration yourself, it will be of little comfort to know that a similar percentage (33 percent) worry that they might never finish the migration project at all.

It appears that many IT professionals find the thought of a migration so frightening that they’ll do anything to avoid it - 59 percent said that they had been so discouraged in the past that they have abandoned a migration completely. The drivers for these fears seem to be concerns about the lack of understanding of the information that needs to be migrated – 126 of the 212 respondents blame their fears on ignorance about the complexity and cleanliness of data, whilst nearly 90 percent believe that data complexity is continuing to increase.

The IT department may know all there is to know about database and application design, but it is clear that they do not know how the information in these systems is used and what it actually means to the business. It’s no wonder, then, that so many application migration projects seek to rule data quality out of scope. And, if the cleanliness and complexity of data is so poorly understood, it should come as no surprise that a high proportion of systems migrations are seen as failures by the business community.

Shine a light on data migration

It would be unfair to see this as a problem for the IT departments making. They may be the guardians of the CRM system, but data is a business asset and the databases and applications it resides in are merely repositories for that asset.

Business users must play an active role in any application migration, not only in the selection and sign-off of the new system but at every stage throughout the data migration lifecycle. To prevent a migration becoming a leap in the dark, organisations need to start by understanding their data thoroughly.

Successful migrations rely on collaboration between business and IT staff. Working together they must first understand, and then transform and improve, the data that is moved from one (or more) system to the other.

The critical first step is to gain an understanding of the data. Profiling customer information destined for a new CRM system is essential to gain a measure of its quality. If, for instance, this identifies an uneven distribution of dates of birth, it may highlight the fact that default or dummy values have been entered to circumvent a mandatory field in the source system. Simply knowing this is valuable – even if it’s not something you can fix - will inform the way that you use the migrated information.

It isn’t reasonable, or realistic, to expect your CRM data to be perfect. However, an Information Quality Assessment (IQA) that includes profiling of the source data (as well as analysing how the information is collected and used) provides valuable insight that can make the difference between the success and failure of any migration project. An IQA uses profiling to identify possible shortcomings of the data and answers questions about how the data was captured and how it can be used. It should be a short sharp exercise the value of which far exceeds the cost of conducting it, but all too often no such exercise is undertaken or it is left far too late in the migration project.

Performing an IQA at an early stage in the migration project brings significant benefits by:
• Identifying deficiencies in the target system that may require custom development.
• Providing critical measures for the data, allowing you to plan how best to exploit it.
• Enabling improvement of data in the source or during the migration to maximise its value.
• Assuring the delivery of the application migration on time and on budget.

And what of the role of the CRM manager during migrations?CRM managers play a critical role in the migration to a new CRM system. As the 'owner' of the customer relationship, they should be involved at every stage, not just the beginning (application selection) and end (user acceptance testing).

As custodian of customer data, they should insist that an IQA is performed right at the outset of the project so that there are no 'unknown unknowns' in the data. Defining rules for transforming and improving data should also involve business users.

Whilst some of the transformations may be technical in nature, any that concern the logical content of the data should be owned by the business. For instance, decisions about whether and how to split compound names (eg Mr & Mrs E A Wintle t/a Abbey Cars) and rules about matching individual and business names should rightfully be made by the CRM team, not left to somebody in IT - who is scared of the project anyway.

Steve Tuck is chief strategy officer for Datanomic Ltd

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