KEY FACTORS IN LEGACY SYSTEMS MIGRATION - A Real Life Case
Teta Stamati, Konstantina Stamati, Drakoulis I. Martakos · 2006
Although legacy systems migration as a subject area is often overlooked in favour of areas such as new technology developments and strategic planning of information technology, most migration projects are considered ill-fated initiatives and a rate of over 80% of these projects run over budget, frequently with system functionality falling short of contract. Many practitioners consider that the proposed theoretical migration approaches are myopic and do not take into account a number of key factors that make a migration project a really complex initiative. Our position is that throughout the life cycle of a migration process, there are some critical factors that initially play the role of the “drivers” and afterwards they became the factors that hinder (“hinders”) the migration process. We consider these key factors as Critical Success Factors (CSF) that must be carefully considered. Furthermore, these key factors could be either overt or covert factors. In each case, the migration engineers should consider and analyse them very carefully prior to the initiation of the migration process and a well-defined migration methodological plan should be developed. The work presented is based on a real life initiative putting emphasis on the key success factors revealing at the same time the complexity of a migration process. Emphasis is put on the required management view and planning effort, rather than on the mere technological issues.