How to Navigate your Next Data Migration

The secret recipe for successful data migration lies in perfect planning and a roadmap. Business owners should work closely with the data migration lead and project managers to meticulously plan and align the migration approach/strategy upfront and identify key deliverables, stakeholders, current pain points, potential risks, or deviations from the overall planning.

Conduct a series of workshops to assess the existing architecture, in-scope data, AS-IS data quality, and document it in an assessment report. Identify key data stakeholders from the business and define clear objectives, scope, assumptions, and roles & responsibilities (RACI) in the data migration program, then report the readiness of the data to migrate to the target system.

Data profiling and cleansing has been an unsung hero of any data migration project and takes a key role before initiating the migration. Profile and assess the existing data based on the data quality assessment, define a data cleansing strategy, and identify business owners/data analysts who will participate in source data cleansing. Accelerate your data cleansing by leveraging an extensive library of pre-defined and proven data quality rules, then evaluate the progress through robust metrics/dashboards.

Technology is only an enabler for a data migration exercise in which any ETL tool can be leveraged to migrate the data, depending on the migration object and strategy. Business users should never solely focus on the technology but aim to bring a holistic and business-centric approach to migration.

Data loss is a serious concern during the migration process. Before initiating the migration, the data owner should perform a thorough series of data backups and versions. Business users or data owners should have a dedicated lower environment with a production data copy (iterative) where the data migration team should fetch their extraction process.

Business owners should not wait until the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) phase to understand the data loaded to the target system but should be involved early and keep track of the volume and quality of data being used for testing. Business and IT should determine critical success factors for each migration cycle to ensure the data migration is on track and signed off.

Effective communication avoids unnecessary roadblocks and prevents panic situations when the open item balances do not match or when critical data mismatches. To overcome this, the business users and the data migration team should agree to have periodic status meetings with traffic light reports emphasizing the overall status of migration and the reason for missing data (due to de-duplication or mapping/transformation).

Business owners should work with the change management team to define a training plan for the business process team and get accustomed to the new target system to validate the data load. The data migration team should ensure that sufficient training is completed by the business users to validate the master and transactional data in the target system after every successful data load.

Document the entire migration process, starting from the overall design, data assessment, ETL approach, testing, and data load strategy until cutover, and hyper care support. Define checkpoints at each stage to review the documentation and business stakeholders should validate/sign off at every stage.

Create a hyper care checklist to note the data migration issues through an issue tracker. Prioritize the hyper care tickets based on the business impact and create a clear statement of work to resolve the open items during the hyper care support to avoid any data-related mitigations. Create a sign off and a seamless handover process for the business users.