IT PROJECT OVERRUNS AND FAILURES LINKED TO
NOT UNDERSTANDING SOURCE DATA
Evoke Software Corp., a pioneer in Data Profiling technology, has announced that a new report from The Standish Group finds that information technology (IT) project overruns and failures can be attributed to a lack of understanding of the source data early on in the data migration process. The report validates the need for a comprehensive data profiling tool to provide IT project managers with an understanding of their data content, structure, quality, and integrity prior to moving the data into a new application or data warehouse.
The Standish Group's recently released "Migrate Headaches" report is based on results from a series of focus groups on data migration with 34 IT executives and Chief Information Officers. The focus groups discussed the procedures, challenges and techniques of migrating data from legacy applications to new or packaged applications or data warehouses. This study is a follow-up to the research firm's "Chaos 198" report which concluded that, in 1998, 74% of all IT projects would either overrun or fail, resulting in nearly $100 billion in unexpected costs.
According to The Standish Group, for a typical IT project involving the implementation of a data warehouse, 50% of the budget goes toward understanding the data, 20% to data movement, and 30% to application development. IT executives in the focus groups corroborated this, noting that 60-80% of the time spent on data migration consists of trying to understand the data, and only a fraction of the time is spent physically moving it.
"The manual process of understanding data is a time consuming effort. Doing it right involves a careful analysis of data content, structure, quality and integrity that must be validated and cross-checked," said Jim Johnson, chairman of The Standish Group. "One focus group participant stated that the effort involved in manually analyzing data has actually led to the cancellation of some of his organization's projects. Other participants admitted to bypassing the manual data profiling phase and suffering the consequences of project delays, budget overruns and even project failures."
The focus group participants agreed that a tool that automates the process of understanding their data would be helpful, but they would require tools that employ a degree of automation combined with the user's understanding of the business process. "Evoke Software's Migration Architect is such a tool," stated Johnson. "With Migration Architect, a typical $1 million data warehousing project will yield a cost savings of 35% (70% of the upfront data analysis portion) or $350,000." The "Migrate Headaches" report concluded that a product such as Migration Architect would go a long way toward alleviating the "migration headache" that many organizations face.
"The 'Migrate Headaches' report validates what our customers have been telling us. Data Profiling and Mapping software enables them to get a better understanding of their data and dramatically improve the outcome of their IT projects," said Craig Olson, vice president of marketing for Evoke Software. "Migration Architect enables project completion in a fraction of the time, at a much lower cost, and with much greater accuracy and quality than is possible with conventional profiling and mapping methodologies."
About Migration Architect
Migration Architect utilizes a combination of automated discovery and interactive analysis to automate the time-consuming and complicated process of profiling legacy data prior to implementing ERP, data warehouse or data consolidation projects. The product's unique inference-based technology enables data and business analysts to interactively profile data sources in three dimensions -- down columns (Column Profiling), across rows (Dependency Profiling), and across tables (Redundancy Profiling) -- providing them with a thorough understanding of data content, structure, quality and integrity. The resulting profile is used to develop an accurate data model and set of source-to-target transformation maps. This is used in conjunction with third-party data migration tools to extract, scrub, transform and load the data from one system to another.
About Evoke Software
Evoke Software designs, develops and markets Data Profiling and Mapping software that shortens time-to-benefit, reduces cost and risk, and increases quality of results for IT projects involving data migration and integration. Based in San Francisco, California, Evoke has sales and support offices throughout the U.S. and in Europe. Select customers include: Alfa Insurance, Automobile Club of Southern California, British Gas Trading, Cable & Wireless, Fleet Financial Group, GEICO, General Motors, Lloyds Bank, and SBC/Pacific Bell. Evoke is a private company funded by several premier investment firms, including Wheatley Partners, Hambrecht & Quist, Axiom Venture Partners and RRE Investors.
For more information, please contact Evoke Software at 877-386-5379 or visit the company's website at http://www.evokesoft.com.