Migrating systems is no simple feat and requires endless amounts of exhausting, manual work in order to lay the groundwork for an efficient migration. Read how automated metadata management is a game-changer in this painstaking process.
With effortless onboarding and no implementation costs, Octopai’s data intelligence platform gives you unprecedented visibility and trust into the most complex data environments.
Migrating systems is no simple feat and requires endless amounts of exhausting, manual work in order to lay the groundwork for an efficient migration. Read how automated metadata management is a game-changer in this painstaking process.
Modern reporting tools provide significant advantages over older
tools, with greater flexibility and ease of use that enable self-service BI. Business users can
leverage BI to build attractive, compelling, and interactive reports and dashboards.
Enterprises are increasingly graduating to these modern reporting systems from legacy
systems, but the migration process is not easy. It requires a significant amount of tedious,
manual preparation to lay the groundwork for an efficient, clean migration.
The data team must answer the following questions and more to ensure a pain-free,
cost-effective migration:
• Which reports are to be migrated from the old tool to the new tool? Not every report in
the portfolio is useful or relevant anymore. Focusing on the ones that are in actual use can
significantly reduce the migration effort.
• How do we build a new ERD (entity relationship diagram) without duplications or old
patches? Eliminating the irrelevant reports means certain data sources may no longer need
representation in the reporting tool. This helps the BI team start fresh with a clean ERD.
• How can we reduce report duplication? Chances are that the legacy system has many
reports that are identical or differ only in minor or cosmetic ways. Consolidating them can
make the results more useful to more end users.
• Are there any scheduling commands that should be rescheduled? When you have
ETL or middleware processes that run on a schedule, generating accurate, meaningful
reports depends on the upstream processes running in the correct sequence. The timing of
each step needs to be analyzed accordingly.
Data teams are accustomed to taking a manual approach when answering these questions.
This means going through the portfolio, report by report, in order to:
• Eliminate reports that simply aren’t needed anymore
• Identify redundancies, obsolete or unreliable data sources
• Target ETL processes that fail to capture relevant data or combine it effectively with other data
It can require a bit of detective work, combing through logs and job schedules in disparate
systems and examining stored procedure code, report definitions, and other esoterica. The process can take weeks or months. And because the company’s data landscape is naturally
always changing, the data team ends up chasing a moving target.
Octopai’s tools can take the pain, tedium, and error out of the preparation process for migration.
• The visual data lineage tools can show which reports are duplicates or near-duplicates; which reports rely on data sources that are obsolete, questionable, or non-existent; and more.
• ETL processes can be identified and analyzed to ensure they are generating the expected output at the right time.
• The data team can easily see the relationships between different data sources, greatly simplifying ERD analysis.
• Reduced time, effort, and error in preparing for system migration
• Assurance that only the reports needed are migrated and that the underlying data and calculations are sound and accurate
• Faster execution of the migration project, enabling business users to take advantage of modern reporting tools sooner
Providing unprecedented visibility and trust into the most complex data environments.
