Strategizing Your Data Migration Leads to Better Data Quality

Drivers and Challenges of Enterprise Integration Revealed

Data integration and migration projects are often an afterthought, according to a recent column by Gary Allemann, a member and senior consultant at Master Data Management.

“Planning and data quality go hand in hand when it comes to data integration and migration, and any other big technology project for that matter,” Allemann writes. “However, the moving of data is often an afterthought, as the business challenge revolves around implementing the new system or merging two disparate systems together.”

He adds that data is often outside the scope of even system integrators, who see it as something the business has to deal with once the system is up and running.

As you might expect, this leads to problems, which is a big reason why integration projects experience such a high (80 percent) failure rate and why unplanned data issues can “consume up to 70 percent of the time and budget in a rework later on,” he writes.

Some of the problems you cause yourself when you don’t address data quality during data migration and data integration:

• You think the data looks one way, it looks another, leading to invalid date information, missing codes, duplicate fields, and incorrectly captured information.
• Loads are dropped when you transfer the data, which means information just – poof – disappears.
• You wind up with multiple copies of data, which causes a host of other problems.
• The whole project is delayed while you try to work through these problems.

He also briefly discusses how you can avoid these types of problems by planning from the get-go. Here’s a hint: Data profiling and data quality play a big role.

If you’re planning a data migration, you might also want to check out “Four Critical Decisions in Data Center Migration,” published this month on Information Week. While it doesn’t discuss data quality concerns specifically, it does cover a long list of business and technology issues to consider before you jump into the migration.

In Other News

If you’re an Oracle DBA or are responsible for data governance, you might want to check out Oracle’s new Data Relationship Governance module. It’s a workflow tool that simplifies initiating and tracking MDM change requests, according to The Register.