In this article, David Katzoff, Managing Director of Valiance Partners, a specialist data migration technology and service provider, outlines a blueprint for designing an effective data migration testing strategy.

David rounds off the article with a useful checklist of recommendations that the reader can use to benchmark their own approach.

To kick this off, we are examining the Communications and Media sector, as represented by the global TM Forum organization’s Data Migration Community.  

The TM Forum data migration community is led by Tony Sceales (also a member of our expert panel), Celona’s CTO and other senior industry figures, the group is in the process of building out an understanding of Best Practice in Data Migration. 

The first step in this process is to survey the TM Forum’s 45,000 members to understand their perspective on what the key issues and drivers for success are, as well as to ask about their experience and capability in Data Migration.

Your views are also extremely valuable, and any Data Migration Pro member can also complete the survey at http://www.tmforum.org/Source/550/home.html.

You will contribute to a crucially important study for our profession.

Please also feel free to join the TM Forum Community and contribute your thoughts and experiences.

Attendees will learn practical techniques to help prevent their project heading for failure or delay.

The approximate running time of the webinar will be 30-45 minutes and if attendees use a VoiP headset then the webinar is completely free. There are local toll numbers available for thos who are dialing in.

To register for the webinar please click the following link:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/916140523

Please note that we will be publishing the webinar in this post after the presentation has completed.

But how do these migrations differ to the more conventional relational database style data migrations? What is the right strategy? What techniques are involved? What are the pitfalls?

We recently caught up with one of our members, David Katzoff, Managing Director of Valiance Partners,  a specialist data migration technology and service provider operating in this space. Dave has kindly answered a few burning questions on this topic.

With just a few days in there have been some serious lessons learned by the organisation on how to approach data migration in the right way.

Details will shortly follow of how to attend the event but DMM2 is inviting IT professionals or senior managers with experience of Data Migration to submit a paper for presentation at Data Migration Matters 2.

The selected paper will be presented at the event by the author.

This year there is a special interest in case studies and lessons learned but all topics will be considered.

If you want to find out more details on how to submit your proposed presentation please follow this link:

http://www.datamigrationpro.com/dmm2

This week John closes out the series with a look at how we can re-plan a failing project and successfully "mop-up" on those outstanding tasks that are so important but often neglected.

We recently contacted John Morris, managing director of iergo and author of Practical Data Migration, for some advice on how our readers can help put their data migration project back on track if it starting to slip off the rails.

John kindly wrote the following series of articles, providing a range of detailed tips and techniques to help you rescue your sinking project.

There are still countless tales from members and visitors to Data Migration Pro of projects being delivered with issues such as poorly conceived methodologies, a lack of data quality management, impossible deadlines and poorly skilled resources.

So how do we turn things around and convince sponsors and stakeholders to invest in a best-practice data migration?

She had been pitching the benefits primarily of cleanse, citing the fact their migration tool had limited DQ capabilities so an additional toolset to manage the more complex transformations was required.

The source systems were largely consumer addresses, their business being B2C in the financial sector. The argument she came up against was that they already had a profiling tool so why couldn't that help solve the problem?

Here are some of the additional areas that DQ tools can help increase the success rate of any data migration project.

The landscape of data migration implementation options has changed in recent years so we thought a brief introduction to the different approaches would benefit our business and non-technical readers in particular.

The following video will illustrate how to create an online application to store, query and share your data quality rules across disparate teams and organisational units.

By creating the repository with the DabbleDB web platform we can eliminate development costs and create a hassle-free hosting solution.

If you missed the first post in this series which discussed the benefits and uses of data quality rules please click here.

Please click on the following image to view the tutorial video or click this link: How to build a DQ Rules Repository

Data Quality Rules Tutorial

Useful Resources

• How to create a data quality rules management repository (Part 1 - What are data quality rules?)
• Iergo free online data migration training (providers of DQ Rules template)

The use of logical and conceptual data models is often a rarity in data migration projects but when adopted correctly they can create significant benefits for both the business and technical community.

In this post we take a closer look at some of the reasons why they can prove so useful.

We've also posted 25 data migration best-practices to ensure your business is ready, willing and able to retire its legacy landscape post-migration.