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.