Hi,
I am a silent member of this forum, and regularly read up on all the posts. About me - I am a BA working in India for over 2 years as a core BA. I have had 30 months experience prior to that in a technical role, hence I have fair understanding of technology in addition to my BA skills. As a BA, I have been involved in a large enterprise project (500 use cases, 6 process documents in BPMN notation, etc.) for customer acquisition for a global telecom major.
I have been involved in the project right from inception to completion (requirements to functional testing prior to go-live). However one activitiy where I did not participate much was the data migration (moving data / transactions / masters) from old system to new system. I want to know from the BA experts here how relevant is the role of BA in such data migration activities. There are specific projects involved in migration (porting application from UNIX to solaris as am example) Does a BA have any role in deciding migration strategies?
Regards,
Ashutosh
More about my profile can be found on my linkedin profile: http://in.linkedin.com/in/watway
Yes, sure they play a role (and provide value.
Consider these questions;
And finally,
I agree with Craig!
The only time when the business analyst doesn't need to be involved in the data migration is when the task is to simply move data from one platform to another without modifying anything else (data structure, fields, columns, etc.)
If the data moves from one format to another then detailed analysis is needed. It is amazing how many times I have witnessed data being migrated or provided to the line of business by the DBA without analysis. What a mistake!
One of the activities needed to be performed during data analysis is ensuring that the meaning of the source data matches the meaning of the target storage. For example, if you're mapping account types from one system to another, do those account types have the same meanings aka does type 1 mean the same in both systems, is there a one to one mapping, etc.?
- Adrian
I'm a Business Analyst since 3 1/2 years. In all my experience as BA i have been doing the requirment gathering from JAD sessions and writing the specification documents. In most of the projects i have worked there was no data analysis before the migration and as Adrian said DBA was doing with so much pain and at the end so much effort was needed to address the issues that come up with this mistake.
So, in new project i have opted the role of BA Data Migration role. I know it's going to be challenge for me but i wanted to take it. I strongly believe that a person who is familiar with the business domain should work closely with clients to keep the Data Migration activity in right direction.
BA will liaison between technical team and client to derive the strategies of data converion that are
-Raghava
There's a big BA role.
You have to analyse the existing information accessed by the various stakeholders, develop current-state and target-state maps, develop front ends and back ends...lots of stuff. Too much to go into.
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