A Lifelong Learning Process

Platform or system upgrades are sometimes looked on as something of a necessary evil, because they do provide you with better system functionality but they come at a price. Not only do you have to factor in the price of the upgrades themselves and the labor costs involved (including the data migration labor costs), but you also have to consider hidden costs, incidental costs, and lost revenue. Here are three questions to ask the support personnel before a data migration event occurs so you can factor all these costs in and budget for them or make plans to minimize them.

1. How much risk is involved in the process?

The main risk in the migration process, data loss can be a big fear for companies who have a lot to lose. Depending on what type of system you were using before and what type you're migrating to, there may be greater or lesser chances of incompatibilities leading to loss of data. You'll want to ask about how much, if any, data is likely to be lost and also ask what you can do to minimize that loss or to make it easier to recover lost data later on.

2. How much time will the process pull from your week and your business?

There's a business side to data migration as well as a technological side, and you'll need to be prepared to answer questions about the business side of the process during the data migration itself. This could take considerable time out of your week, or just a little, depending on the details of your migration. Discuss this beforehand, and be sure to talk about how much time your system will spend offline as well so you can make arrangements to minimize the revenue your business loses while the system is down. For example, you can let your customers know you have downtime scheduled (some of them will plan around this and you'll still get to do business with them).

3. What needs to be done in advance?

If there are things you and your team need to do in advance to get the system ready for data migration, you need to make sure you're extremely clear on what those things are so that you can be 100% sure they're done in time. Otherwise you could end up dragging out the process and spending more money on labor costs and so forth.

These questions will help you get a good overall picture of how the data migration process will go and what you need to do to plan for it and reduce its drain on your time, revenue, and income. Contact a company like Famsoft to learn more.