Data Migration and Remediation
Realizing the business benefits and the opportunities of upgrades, consolidations and reporting.One of the most significant challenges that our clients face is the migration and sourcing of data, driven by an application upgrade, consolidation of systems or reporting of information. Despite the profound dependencies on these data intensive activities, to the success of an overall project, and ultimately to the success of the business, they are often given minimal attention and resources. It is not uncommon for an organization to experience delays and cost overruns when managing a data migration and not be fully confident in the reporting of their corporate and operational information. They may hire a small technical team to work in relative isolation from the larger project, using a black box approach to data migration and reporting, handing off some high level requirements and mappings to a handful of developers. And then wait until integration testing to evaluate the results. These teams are in great jeopardy of missing target dates and exposure to the outcomes of mapping invalid data. In addition, many organizations will attempt to separate the movement of the data from the cleansing, or data quality processes, required to prepare the data for the target application. There is a misleading belief that data quality and data migration can be implemented separately, by distinct teams, and still support business processes. This approach is costly and specious. Applying very straightforward disciplines of data governance and quality can mitigate these risks and allow the project team to better manage the data migration process on an ongoing basis.
ICAP Consulting Group helps clients find the safe and simplest route to migrating data, while ensuring the integrity of information. A data migration is a single event that requires expertise that your organization may not possess. It simply does not happen often enough. Standard application development and support processes do not apply to data migration projects. Discovering that they don't during a large project is costly and time consuming. At ICAP Consulting Group we can help you with the planning and application of best practices that are distinct to a data migration project. We help you avoid the errors which are invariably, knowledge of the source data, understanding of the data quality needed to support the new application and business processes, and the complexity of transforming the current data to meet new requirements. For example, a relatively straightforward business need, such as improved same store sales analysis, can lead to a myriad of data mapping, transformation and consolidation processes. The discipline of managing data migration projects is unique for good reason. The challenges of knowing, mapping and realizing the benefits of your data require very specific experience and applied know-how. The choice to learn this 'on the job' is too expensive and risky for your organization. ICAP Consulting Group provides our clients with the direction needed to navigate through the challenges inherent in a data migration or reporting project.
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