Digital Dust Left in the Form of Data after a Core System Replacement Can Adversely Impact Businesses.
Across all sectors, businesses face an unprecedented wave of technological demands, requiring significant transformation, often whilst grappling with rising costs and shrinking margins. Most digitisation programs start with many promises, including automation, productivity uplift, customer experience, effective document management, improved data capture and better data insights. However, too many of these legacy simplification programs fail to deliver on their data promises, leaving the business worse off than before when it comes to availability, quality and completeness of data.
Messy data conversion from old systems to the new can become a costly undertaking. In one example, a large organisation migrated data relating to customer consent to receive Electronic Notice Delivery (END) to a new system. Thousands of “yes” flags became “null” in the process. As a result, call centre operators despatched physical renewal notices to tens of thousands of customers who had consented to receiving digital ones instead. This error cost that business $4 million.
At Ingrity, we believe there are six key areas every core system modernisation program must focus on, in order to deliver the data promise. These are:
- Requirements – Defining data requirements for new core systems – both data input and data output – is crucial for a smooth migration. Both business and technical requirements should be defined upfront.
- Mapping – Ensure there is clear mapping between the data in your legacy system and the new platform. This process helps prevent data loss or misinterpretation during migration. Paying attention to how data fields will map from the old system to the new one and applying necessary transformations for compatibility are crucial.
- Migration – Assess the quality of your existing data before migration. Identify outdated, duplicated or incomplete data and clean it up to avoid carrying poor-quality data into the new system. Ensure data is in a consistent format that is compatible with the new digital core systems.
- Testing and Validation – Run test migrations to validate data accuracy and completeness in the new system. Post-migration, perform data audits to ensure that data integrity has been maintained and that all records are accurate and intact.
- Design a unified data model – Develop a unified data model that accommodates both legacy and new data. Ensure that the model supports scalability, manages evolving data sources and is optimised for performance. Define how old and new data entities relate to each other, considering overlaps, redundancies or new relationships that need to be modelled.
- Refreshing reporting and analytics – Refactor existing reports and dashboards to use both old and new data. Adjust calculations, KPIs, and visualisations to reflect the unified model and provide insights from both datasets.
By integrating old and new data into a unified data model, businesses can maintain historical insights while leveraging the power of the new system for real time analytics and decision making. This combined approach ensures continuity, data accuracy and deeper insights across both legacy and new systems.
At Ingrity, we have supported many core system modernisation programs as a data partner and have successfully worked across all six areas outlined above. We would be delighted to share our experiences and assist companies on the data stream of the core system simplification journey.
If this topic is of interest to you, we’d love to hear from you. To connect with our CEO directly, simply email sanan.thamo@ingrity.com