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Solving the $600 Billion Problem? Data migration projects costing businesses more than 13 times the amount budgeted

Companies today spend millions of dollars and exhaust countless hours (above and beyond estimated time and costs) in their attempts to successfully complete data warehousing, customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence (BI) and other data-centric projects. The Data Warehousing Institute estimates that data quality problems cost U.S. businesses more than $600 billion a year. In an effort to improve data quality and to create the necessary information exchange resources required by today's challenging and dynamic business landscape, many companies have turned to ETL and other related data quality tools. But how are these tools impacting project timelines and cost? A survey, released in November by Information Architecture Team (IAT), has already returned some eye-opening results.

Most survey respondents have participated in several data migrations, yet they continue to be plagued by the same problems over and over. Preliminary results are as follows:

1. More than 60% of respondents cited bad data and duplicate data as the primary reasons for data quality problems.

2. Over 90% of respondents indicated that incomplete mapping, speed of data movement over network and load monitoring were the most critical problems resulting in project delays or failures.

3. The median cost of a data migration project was 13.5 times the amount budgeted.

4. Mapping typically took nearly three months longer than planned.

5. Testing typically took over four months longer than planned.

6. More than 30% of respondents required additional hardware to exclusively support data migration activity.

7. The median cost of this additional hardware purchase was $225,000.

The survey's final results will be presented in at the 2003 ODTUG (Oracle Development Tools User Group) conference in Miami and will be available online. To participate in the survey, or to see the specific questions being asked, visit www.ia-team.com/etl-survey.

For more information about Information Architecture Team, please visit www.ia-team.com.

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