Moving to a new core banking system is full of excitement, until the data migration process experiences unexpected interruption despite impeccable planning. One such aspect is leaving behind some data elements that you’ve spent years collecting and organising.
Leave behind some data, What does it mean?
In a core banking replacement program, data migration is mostly executed with an end state system perspective.
This means the migration team is completely aligned to fulfilling the data needs of the new system during the data mapping activity.
In order to fulfil the data needs of the target system, multiple initiatives are taken up like:
- Data cleansing
- Data enrichment
- Building workarounds for data fitment
But a very critical aspect, which is, looking at the data elements from the source system perspective is missed in such a practise.
Once the target system’s data fulfilment is completed, source perspective must be looked seriously to avoid impacts around
- Business reporting
- MIS collection and
- BAU operations.
How do we ensure we don’t leave behind critical data?
In our experience this can be achieved by implementation of data catalog.
Data catalog is a very essential artefact in data migration program.
A data catalog maintains an inventory of data assets through the discovery, description, and organization of datasets of all the systems in the enterprise. Please note, in this context, data catalog doesn’t refer to glossary of data elements in the enterprise, instead those that are critical for day to day operations. During the data mapping activity, each element in the data catalog is scanned and an end state mapping to the respective data element is updated.
This way we ensure to create a mapper between source and destination and at the same time get an insight of those that are left behind.
As a best practice, every data catalog element is mapped.
if unmapped, they are justified with right reasoning and confirmation from business and technical stakeholders.
What can we achieve?
In a core banking data migration, giving data confidence to the business user post the migration is a measure of the success. Reverse mapping brings in that comfort to all the stakeholders of the transformation program. We take this very serious in our implementations and execute it meticulously.
Also, as part of core banking replacement, solution gaps of the end system are identified and analysed superimposing the business process followed and how the customer is serviced? In our experience, there are instances where solution gaps are unearthed due to lack of analysis of data elements in the source system. Reverse mapping ensures such solution gaps are identified at the early stage of the project and a correct solution is implemented efficiently.
This way we ensure data migration is executed
- On budget
- On time
- 100% accurate
- for the expected scope
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