Data Migration – acceler8 Inc.

The target system is usually under change during the project.
Requirements cannot be known at start.
Many requirement are discovered during the process.
Many requirements change.
All result in constant and expensive change control.
Legacy systems contain a great deal of historical data which either has to be moved or dropped.
This data either has to be moved completely or migrated into data warehouses and the target system.
Older data requires more cleansing.
All this has to be performed with full auditability and reconciled.

All data cleansed, reconfigured and moved in one operation.
The migration is performed in a short controllable timeframe.
The migration is fully audited and reconciled.
Edge case data is dealt with, avoiding the need for exception reports.
All historical data is present, avoiding the need run source systems past the end of the project.
The source systems can be decommissioned immediately.

Migration requirements are initially authored by the business team
Initial implementation is developed (in a traditional language/tool) by technical/business team
Complexity must be managed by hand in the implementation
All errors, whether requirements or coding errors, must be discovered and put through change control.
New requirements are discovered, target system changes, requirements change require costly change control
Reruns are only possible after the change control process has occurred and the changes have been implemented – significantly limiting their frequency.
Changes must be re-implemented and regression issues managed (are failures new requirements or regression issues)?
As the project progresses exceptions become increasing difficult to manage and usually result in exception reporting – make reconciliation difficult.
Final outcome is usual unsatisfactory.

Business user develop requirements stand-alone (without having to understand the implementation.)
Requirements are transformed automatically into the code that runs, avoid the traditional development step.
This delivers significant error reduction.
This also enables business users to easily change requirements and have the code change automatically.
This reduces the costs of development and change control and greatly improves maintainability.
Reruns can occur immediately the requirements have changed – which enables a significantly higher rerun frequency – potentially dozens a day.
Requirements can be discovered late into the project to deal with exceptional cases without affecting the outcome.
The requirements can be automatically compared to the known data models (source and target) for completeness checks and checked within themselves for consistency.
Reconciliation checks and regression scripts can be automated from the same sources and run after each execution to aid analysis.

It is important in any data migration project that you can be sure (even prove) the data was migrated correctly.
You need to be able to answer any question starting with “How do you know ….?”
The acceler8 data migration solution enables you to answer question like:
- How do you know the requirements are correct?
- How do you know all the data has been moved completely?
- How do you know the data is correct?
- How do you know the new system will operate correctly?