Interacting with the business at the right level is really difficult because the business sometimes feel that reviewing each data item is ‘too complicated’, ’self explanatory’ or ‘a waste of time’. And for the variety of data items that are there this is reasonably relevant. But, don’t run the risk of not reviewing each data item with at least 1 business representative.
As an example, a field that seems ’simple’ would be ‘Customer Full Name’. This is something that is held in the Source system as a Free Text field, but in the Target, this field is dynamically created using the First Name, Initials and Surname. This means that if we change the way we construct the name that we use to address mail to, this will be dynamically updated.
Thus it was decided that the Customer Full Name is discarded and this will be reconstructed in the target system as part of the data load.
Months later the UAT team were doing a review of data where the client was under the age of 16, who required a parent/ guardian that would act as a representative (and thus receive all the correspondence for), we found that the client’s parent had been ‘lost’. The business then advised that they do not in fact always capture the Parent/ Guardian as an entity in its own right, they actually just update the minor’s Customer Full name with the parent’s name. This then sparked a flurry of activity including the finding that there were +-800 clients where the mail name does not match their First name, Initial and Surname.
This caused concern regarding how much of the Data migration could be trusted, and how thoroughly the analysis and mapping was done because something as ’simple’ as this could be missed.
