JMR UK Consultancy Ltd

Signing off the Data Mapping on a Data Migration project

Why Data Migration is challenging

Data Migration is a challenging project because interacting with the business at the right level can be complex because the business sometimes feels that reviewing each data item is ‘too complicated’, ‘self-explanatory’ or ‘a waste of time’. And for a variety of data items that are there this is reasonably relevant. But, don’t run the risk of not reviewing each data item with at least 1 business representative when you are doing a data migration project

My early Data Migration Experience

This happened on an early data migration project that I was involved with. A field that seemed ‘simple’ would be ‘Customer Full Name’. This is something that was held in the Source system as a Free Text field, but in the Target, this field is dynamically created using the First Name, Initials and Surname. Thus the project team decided that the Customer Full Name would be discarded and it would be reconstructed in the target system as part of the data load.

Data Migration Lesson Learned

Months later the UAT team were doing a review of data and found that for all cases where the client was under the age of 16, the parent/guardian information had been ‘lost’. Upon further investigation, we found that the users had used a workaround for the deficiencies in the source system. The workaround involved inserting the part/guardian details into the Customer Full Name field where the client was under the age of 16 so that the parent/guardian would receive all correspondence for the minor.

Of course, this workaround would have been discovered earlier had we done the analysis of the data, or even spoken to a few users about this field prior to the mapping. Even though the problem was reasonably easy to fix in the data migration, the error caused concern in the user community regarding how much of the migrated data could be trusted, and how thoroughly the analysis and mapping had been done because something as ‘simple’ as this could be missed.

Data Migration Methodology

Our Data Migration Methodology has been built up over our years of experience and we have incorporated extensive testing, reconciliation, review and validation into our data migration methodology.

How JMR Consulting Ltd can Help with Your Data Migration Project

JMR Consulting UK Ltd’s core expertise is based upon its Financial Services heritage and 15 years of operating in the Finance and IT sectors. Over this period, JMR’s staff have developed key application migration and data migration solutions and a constant focus on our service philosophy which is at the core of JMR’s business operation.

This post was written by Jo-Anne Owen, a member of the Professional Services team at JMR Consulting UK Ltd. If you would like more information about data migration or our professional services, please call us on 0845 052 0900 or email info@jmruk.com. If you would like to become part of our professional services team, please email jobs@jmruk.com.

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