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.

1. After my research Data Migration is necessary at least in 50% of the application development projects.

2. 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.

3. 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?

1. The task was estimated the badly, the real job is much more than is seemed in the first look
2. The scope determination was insufficient
3. The necessary tools and instruments were missing
4. The responsibility area was not clearly defined
5. The communication between the experts / stakeholders was partly missing
6. 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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