A Roadmap to Data Migration Success

WHITE PAPER
A ROADMAP TO DATA MIGRATION SUCCESS
CONTENTS Data migration is the one-time movement of data from a legacy source, or multiple 2 Planning and Scoping the Migration sources, to a new target database. This simple concept and requirement can 2 A llowing for Dependency Management 3 Establishing Data Governance and drive a scope that is much larger than expected. A data migration requirement Stewardship can be driven by a range of initiatives, such as an application replacement or 5 Building the Migration Team upgrade, the need to consolidate data within a data warehouse, or a requirement to 6 P roject Planning Considerations create a single view of product within an organization. In cases where migrated 6 Mapping Business Needs data is transformed for new uses, your project team encounters some very 6 Assessing Infrastructure 9 U nderstanding Data specific management and technical challenges. For example, a team that has been writing extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) code for a data warehouse faces a new set of challenges when migrating data to a live, operational system. Although a 2% error rate may be acceptable for aggregate reporting, it is not acceptable for customer contact data-in this example, we would fail to recognize one out of 50 customers when they call! Many significant business initiatives and large IT projects depend upon a successful data migration. Your goal is to minimize as much of your risk as possible through effective planning and scoping. The objective of this paper from Business Objects, an SAP company, is to provide insight into what issues are unique to data migration projects and to offer advice on how to best approach them.PLANNING AND SCOPING THE MIGRATION
As with any project, success depends upon a good plan. Data migration projects have a distinct methodology and project approach. Too often, project managers make the costly mistake of thinking that migrating data is a simple task within a larger project and hand it off to a development team. Table 1 lists the migration tasks that must be considered.
Table 1. Migration TasksMigration Element ActivitiesBusiness needs mapping Ensure that your migration plan is driven by the expectations and needs of the usersInfrastructure There are unique infrastructure requirements that should be sorted as early as possible in the project timelineIdentifying data sources and targets Validate the system of record for your source data and identify the data needs of your target databaseEvaluating the data quality Assess the quality of your data to meet the target application requirements and business needsGap analysis between source and target Identification, and plan for mitigation, of any gaps between available source data and target application data requirementsImpact of multiple sources of data Estimate the challenges of consolidating similar data from several sources, or integrating dissimilar dataMapping assessment Understand the effort required to accurately identify source data at column level detail, including transformation specificationsMigration assessment Understand the effort required to design, code, test and implement the data migration
In addition to these tasks, the following sections detail two additional project management considerations that are essential to any data migration - dependency management and data governance planning.
ALLOWING FOR DEPENDENCY MANAGEMENTDon't forget that most risk is outside of your control or scope. Numerous other projects, initiatives, and issues may influence a data migration project. Your project manager or team leader must be a good communicator and be aware of the decisions and changes happening in the larger environment. The following scenarios can change your plan and affect the scope of your data migration.Scenario: Larger ProjectsData migration plans and schedules typically are driven by larger projects-for example a master data management (MDM) initiative, a new business process, or a data consolidation effort that supports a new reporting environment.
Business Objects. A Roadmap To Data Migration Success Any changes to the parent project schedule affect the data migration schedule, including changes to production deployment, and the changes to test and beta deployment schedules. The parent project may change its approach to implementation, such as moving from a regional phased approach to a produ... [download for more]