The Efficient Way To Manage Data Migration

Outlining a plan is the most critical piece of a migration. Every migration must have a certain amount of strategic digital transformation of the information moving from the source repository to the destination. Considerations should include search capabilities, security, mapping metadata, folder structure, and many other aspects that will help users to find pertinent content. It is crucial that you spend the time to document the problems you’re having and what is necessary to resolve them.

Why Do Migrations Fail?

There are several reasons for this, most of which center around poor planning. While most businesses share the same requirement to access data easily, they frequently vary on how they land there. There are numerous repositories that you can leverage when in reference to data sorting, but without a solid plan in place, these resources can fail to perform. Be sure you’ve crossed your t’s and dotted your i’s before migrating.

Wave has been performing enterprise migrations and delivering strategic planning services since the ’90s. We’ve executed migrations for customers utilizing OpenText, Microsoft, IBM, Paperclip, and more.

Our experienced team appreciates the particular hurdles that can arise in both current and legacy ECM platforms and we’ve distilled our ways over the years as technology has changed. Utilize our expertise to deploy a fruitful migration and digital transformation.

What Should You Consider When Planning A Data Migration?

Take An Inventory

Take the the time to assess what you have, how it’s cataloged, the amount and what kinds of content you have, and any features you desire like versions, annotations, and processes.
Clean & Organize

Data migrations resemble moving to a new home- identify what you want to take with you and what you don’t need. Maybe you have data that is not needed. While analyzing your content, take a minute to pinpoint areas for progress specifically as it pertains to your operational methods and metadata.
Test The Migration Process

Next, you should evaluate your migration and determine a standard to see how long the migration will be. Also, implement a data swap evaluation to ensure your migration pipeline is hiccup-free.
Check In Regularly

If you notice that your migration will take longer than planned during the criteria evaluating process, be sure to create routine check-ins during that cycle and ensure no problems happen. If they do, you can fine-tune your project plan.
Validate Your End Result

To ensure that your end result in the destination system coincides with what you began with in the source platform, have a verification protocol in place. If you’ve done data regulation during the migration, your validation should be able to account for that.
Account For New Content

Sometimes you aren’t able to make the whole system read-only during a migration, and new data is created. You’ll want to be sure to justify any new metadata and any new data that’s added.
Leverage AI Where Possible

Many sources now offer Artificial Intelligence features that can automate the data cataloging part of your migration. Should you choose to use this feature, you can leverage existing metadata, and improve it with the support of your AI tools.