Migration of CRM

An interesting article on migration here looking in particular at CRM migration. It re-inforces the view that success depends upon the collaboration between business and IT staff rather than the excellence of one and the abscene of the other.

The critical first step is to gain an understanding of the data. Profiling customer information destined for a new CRM system is essential to gain a measure of its quality. If, for instance, this identifies an uneven distribution of dates of birth, it may highlight the fact that default or dummy values have been entered to circumvent a mandatory field in the source system. Simply knowing this is valuable – even if it’s not something you can fix - will inform the way that you use the migrated information.

It isn’t reasonable, or realistic, to expect your CRM data to be perfect. However, an Information Quality Assessment (IQA) that includes profiling of the source data (as well as analysing how the information is collected and used) provides valuable insight that can make the difference between the success and failure of any migration project. An IQA uses profiling to identify possible shortcomings of the data and answers questions about how the data was captured and how it can be used. It should be a short sharp exercise the value of which far exceeds the cost of conducting it, but all too often no such exercise is undertaken or it is left far too late in the migration project.

Performing an IQA at an early stage in the migration project brings significant benefits by:

• Identifying deficiencies in the target system that may require custom development.
• Providing critical measures for the data, allowing you to plan how best to exploit it.
• Enabling improvement of data in the source or during the migration to maximise its value.
• Assuring the delivery of the application migration on time and on budget.

And what of the role of the CRM manager during migrations? CRM managers play a critical role in the migration to a new CRM system. As the 'owner' of the customer relationship, they should be involved at every stage, not just the beginning (application selection) and end (user acceptance testing).

As custodian of customer data, they should insist that an IQA is performed right at the outset of the project so that there are no 'unknown unknowns' in the data. Defining rules for transforming and improving data should also involve business users.

Whilst some of the transformations may be technical in nature, any that concern the logical content of the data should be owned by the business. For instance, decisions about whether and how to split compound names (eg Mr & Mrs E A Wintle t/a Abbey Cars) and rules about matching individual and business names should rightfully be made by the CRM team, not left to somebody in IT - who is scared of the project anyway.