The lost and essential art of data migration and cleaning

In our experience, data migration and data cleaning often involves a huge amount of manual work. As a result these projects end up being expensive and time consuming. Most of this is because people don’t really know how to correctly use technology to enrich, clean, and sort the data for migration purposes.

As well as this, data migration and cleaning is usually attempted by people without the right skill set. Even if you are a programmer you still might not have all the skills needed. Then to compound this, while data migration and cleaning is essential, it is a very unsexy and unglamorous job.

This mixture of expensive, unsexy, and difficult is a dangerous combination.

All of this results in data migration and cleaning being one of the most misunderstood and undervalued skills in the tech industry. The nature of the job is results in talented programmers not staying in the work long term. With a significant amount of this work being performed by junior programmers there is a loss of continued knowledge and expertise of a vital skill set for your business.

This complex undertaking can be inefficient and frustrating for all involved. The process often takes far longer than necessary, creating time delays, loss of productivity and often a loss in the integrity of your organizations data. Data migration and cleaning projects lead by inexperienced and uninvested staff create headaches for all, with little understanding of project length and if it is being performed for optimal results.

What can complicate this process even further is when the focus is on migrating your financial accounting data. This is an area where specialist knowledge is required to prevent a loss of high value information and time. It has become clear to us at Lumen that the uniting of strong programming experience and financial accounting knowledge is key to a successful outcome.

Not knowing why and what you need to achieve is a sure way to make mistakes. We as a company have over 15 years of multidisciplinary experience and specialization in data cleaning and data conversion work. This makes us a safer way to complete the work on time and on budget, a sound investment in your migration project, allowing you and your team to focus on the work that is important to them.