Migrations can be messy and hard to manage. Many fall short of their intended goals – victims of cost overruns and missed schedules.

When errors occur, adverse consequences are worse than may first appear. This is because migrations are tied to a larger context – the successful deployment of an enterprise application for example.

The implications of a migration strategy can be significant, even critical to an organization. Good methods and tools are needed for any strategy to work. Unfortunately, in the realm of migrations these have been inadequate.

This is why Valiance is focused on the creation of new technologies and techniques that improve migration results.

Problem
Less than 20% of migration projects are completed on time and budget.  Why are migrations so challenging?

Key factors include:

• Scope – The scope of a migration cannot be defined precisely until comprehensive testing is completed, a process meaningfully performed only in the latter stages of the project.
• Tools – Migration tools can require a significant configuration effort; yet test results usually demand configuration changes and subsequent rework late in the process.
• Testing – Traditional migration testing and “best” quality assurance practices are inefficient and inadequate.
• Context – Migrations are usually approached from a technical perspective and user inputs are given only cursory attention.

Risk
The implications of a poorly executed migration extend far beyond the task itself.

From a business perspective, problems include application error, inaccurate reporting, compliance and liability issues. Potential adverse impact is proportional to several factors:

• Volume of data and/or content
• Complexity of source to target data transformations
• Economic and goodwill costs that scale with the effects on operations, litigation, loss of brand value, market share, etc.

From an applications standpoint, here are some examples:

• Product Liability – Product Complaint Management is critical to any manufacturing company, particularly those in a regulated industry. Investigation processes require accurate product histories. Any migration must be accurate because risk is significant and transformations from legacy sources tend to be complex.  
• Agency Correspondence – Government agency correspondence has significant legal implications. The corruption or loss of any of this content during its migration from one or more sources to a target system can generate significant organizational risk.
• Evidentiary Discovery – Litigation support costs and faulty electronic discovery are the direct result of badly managed critical information.  The deployment of a state-of-the-art content repository or records management application will do little to mitigate this unless any inbound migration of existing content enjoys a high degree of reliability.