Archive for the ‘data migration market research’ Category
Data Migration Matters – The event
The data migration market is there and growing
But it is not in the skull of the decision makers
The proof: 10 years ago 80% of the migration projects were unsuccessful. In 2007 after the survey of Bloor Research, 84% of the migration projects failed: either overrun the budget or could not finished in time. The survey also says that the budget of the data migration projects will raise from 500 to $ 900 million until 2012.
On the 1st October I participated on the event Data Migration Matters 2 in London. In the next posts I reflect my thoughts about the lessons of this day.
Why migration projects fail?
Migration is always the necessary evil in introduction of a brand new shiny system or organisation restructuring. That is the reason, that they are always underestimated, and the scope is not completely defined.
To save costs, companies think that the cheapest solution is the “DIY” – Do It Yourself. The result: 89% of the internally made migration projects will fail. I do not mention now the telecommunication companies, banks and insurance companies, where data migration projects are continuously executed, I mean the companies, where a big restructuring or introduction of a new ERP happens once in 10-15 years.
If decision makers think about the migration of existing data, than they give the task to the IT department. It don’t want to underestimate and decrease the significant of the IT in a company, because I have also strong IT roots, but this time I must clearly say: data migration is not the task of the IT Experts! The thinking of the IT people do not reflects the Business Needs and the result will be always unhappy business users and/or failed project. The solutions is building virtual teams from Business Experts, IT Experts and Project Manager. Johny Morris, the author of the Bible of the Data Migration (Practical Data Migration) thinks: the data migration project is a quest, where all parties have a clear goal to finish the project successfully. In a quest all team members will give their best to achieve the common goal.
The last significant failure cause of the data migration projects is the lack of specialists. There are lot of independent consultants (like myself on migration.hu), migration consultancy companies (like iergo, Kognitio, Datamonic, DataFlux), solution providers (like Talend, Trillium Software, Informatica) on the market, they have the knowledge and proof of finished successful migration projects.
What is the goal of the migration projects?
Every project manager want to hold the number of risks low in their projects. At the moment an application migration project has a very big risk: the data migration subproject. The goal is to lower the risks of these projects, to predict the outcomes of the data migration, lower the impacts in a daily business activities. These all will result a Zero Defect Migration which is the main goal of a data migration project.
Conclusion: Supply and Demand
Why do not meet the highly educated and experienced Migration Solution Supply and the Demand in the market? The answer is the bad timing! In 98% of the life cycle of the companies has no need to migrate data. And when they need to execute data migrations, than they don’t know about the safest and cheapest solution: using of data migration experts.
So our task is in the next years to communicate to the world: there is a solution, there are proven ways, better to estimate first an unknown task in case of data migration needs, than fail and loose lot of money.
There is a solution to eliminate the bad timing of the migration in the market and lower the failure risk in a potential data migration project: it is already being used: keeping the data quality of the data centers in the companies by using data governance.
Once again: the data migration market is there. We, the members of the data integration profession community can deepen the market in the head of the decision makers with continuously communicating with the potential customers.
What is the most frightened fact in the Data Migration Projects?
Data Migration Market Research
Why did I shoot full the Hungarian Internet and video sharing sites in the last months with the message, that the Data Migration is an area which is not considered by the industry analyzers in the most of the cases?
Lets look the boring numbers: The Data Migration part of the projects has a success rate of only 16%, in other words those, they are delivered in time and in the budget limit*. (*The facts and numbers are based the Bloor Research from 2007, author is Philip Howard Research Director)
Stop for a moment and look what does it mean. Imagine, that your boss gives you 10 tasks in 10 months. You will accomplish the task in 10 months once or max. twice, that you don’t run out of the time and you don’t spend more than planned. What do you mean, is your job ensured after this efficiency? Not to mention, if you have a company and 16% successful closed projects…
Don’t take this as bagatelle, because data migration should be a niche market.
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After my research Data Migration is necessary at least in 50% of the application development projects.
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The Data Migration is the part of the bigger project in most of the cases, and the number above is the bottle neck. So if the task data migration is not successful, then it will pull down the entire project.
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After the Bloor Research’s survey the data migration projects reached the threshold of 5 billion $ in 2007. The market is growing and until 2012 it will reach the $ 8bn. This is a growing of 12% yearly in average.
What is the reason of the high rate of unsuccessful data migration projects?
If you take your 15 years old car to the garage for yearly checking, the experienced mechanic will say after the first look , that your car will be ready in two days, and he will specify what will be checked and change. What will happen if you call your mechanic on the third day?
“Mr. Bossanyi, this car has much more problems than expected. I can clearly see, that it suffers from missed maintenance. Furthermore there are some defects that I cannot repair on-site because I don’t have the necessary instrument, I have to take it into the “Super Diagnostic Garage” to find the reason to get fixed. And the worse thing is, it has some electronic problem which is far not my area. I could not find any expert who help to solve this problem. You have to take your car in some “Hyper Diagnostic Garage”.
How to translate it to the world data migration?
- The task was estimated the badly, the real job is much more than is seemed in the first look
- The scope determination was insufficient
- The necessary tools and instruments were missing
- The responsibility area was not clearly defined
- The communication between the experts / stakeholders was partly missing
- There are missing actions from the past which have been ensured the high and sufficient quality of the system (in the example above the car maintenance).
These points are the most significant problems, they cause the miserable results of the most data migration projects. The goal of this blog is to share my experiences from this area and find solutions to reach a better success rate for the next market survey in 2017. If you would like to find more information from the data migration profession then visit datamigrationpro.com. If you want to know more from the related area, the ensuring of data quality issues, then visit the community site dataqualitypro.com.
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