As the pace of global change quickens, more and more organisations are being established, merging with others, or restructuring themselves. Such changes, if they are to be effective, must be supported by the information technology on which business has become reliant. The resultant upgrades to systems are often associated with the need to “convert” or “migrate” data from one system to another. Data migrations vary greatly, reflecting the diversity of the associated organisations and systems. Individual data migrations are characterised by many factors, including:

• the number of source systems
• the number of target systems
• technical differences between the source and target systems
  (e.g. between the computer hardware platforms on which the systems run,
  or the formats in which the data is stored)
• functional differences between the source and target systems (e.g. in the accounting in which the conventions used to process financial data)
• the volumes of data to be transferred
• the interdependencies between the data migration and other aspects of the overall system change. For instance, does the migration have to occur at the beginning or end of the overall process?
• the strategy for the migration (e.g. whether it is to be carried out in phases
  or in a single operation, as a "big bang")
• the degree of automation. Most migrations will require some manual intervention, indeed in many cases it may have been deemed more cost-effective to perform at least part of the migration by manual input into
  the target system.

At ATD we believe that data migration is an integral part of system change,
and has the potential to offer further benefits, for instance by providing a better understanding of the data and its value to the organisation.

Find out more about ATD's approach to data migration:

• Business Transition
• Methodology
• Toolkit