Migration projects are typically lengthy and costly, in no small part because they involve moving vast amounts of information and data. However, the load can be lightened by asking two questions before you get started: How much do you actually have to move, and how do you decide what goes and what stays? The answer, in a word, is governance, which when applied at the outset will thin your informational herd and save you time and money in the end.
A quick trip to the Internet puts the average current deployment age for legacy ECM, records, and document platforms in the U.S. at 6 to 16 years – a wide range, but still long enough to suggest that many of these systems are close to aging out (if they haven’t already). At the same time, market indicators suggest U.S. migration services demand is growing at more than 20% annually. This tells me – as do most of my client experiences – that if you’re not already looking into migration-related issues, you soon will be. So the time to begin preparing is now.
Current Considerations to Avoid Future Pain
I’ve written before about the dangerous tendency organizations have to put off their migration prep until “the time comes” – which sadly often isn’t until something bad has already happened. This isn’t to say that if you have an old system, you must migrate immediately. But you absolutely should not wait to begin the process.
Before you move a single byte, apply the disciplines of good governance to assess and reduce the volume of information you actually need to migrate. Here are a few considerations to address now to avoid unnecessary pain later:
- Deduplication: Seek and destroy duplicates, which can account for as much as 40% of the volume you’re storing.
- Retention requirements: Determine which of what remains is no longer subject to retention requirements (and, of course, is not under legal hold) so it can be defensibly disposed of rather than migrated.
- Frequency of access: Analyze system logs to identify the information that is accessed most frequently and most recently. This helps prioritize what users truly need on Day One in the new environment.
- File sizes and types: Understand the size and format of your remaining information to better estimate the bandwidth, processing power, and storage capacity the target system will require.
Applying the principles of governance to migration shifts your strategy from simply moving information, to moving only information that has business value. This thinning of your informational herd lowers migration costs, shortens project timelines, reduces risk, and gives users a cleaner, more manageable new environment from the very beginning. As such, there’s just one question remaining:
What are you waiting for?