Data Migration
Migrations Do Not Fail Because of Tools
The tooling market has never been better, and the failure rate has barely moved. The variable is ownership.
Dave Welensky, Director · Published August 2026 · 3 min read
Every failing migration we have been called into had capable tools, correctly installed. What they lacked was a named owner for every data domain, rules in business language, and reconciliation evidence the owner could read. Ownership is the variable that moves.
Good tools, failing programme
Every failing migration we have been called into had good tools. SAP Data Services, Syniti, Informatica: capable platforms, correctly licensed, competently installed. The extract jobs ran. The load jobs ran. And the programme was still in trouble.
“Migrations do not fail because of tools. They fail because no one owns the data. We change that.”
Ownership is the difference between a mapping decision and a mapping guess. When nobody owns customer master data, the question of which of four duplicate records survives is answered by whoever is loudest in the workshop, or worse, by the default behaviour of the tool. Multiply that by every object, every field, every country, and the programme is quietly accumulating decisions nobody made.
The unglamorous fix
Name an owner for every data domain before mapping starts. Put the business rules in writing, in business language, with the owner's name on them. Make reconciliation evidence readable by that owner, because a sign-off from someone who cannot read the evidence is theatre.
On the programmes that go well, the data owners can tell you at any point what has moved, what has not, and what the open decisions are. On the programmes that fail, that sentence has no subject. The tools were never the problem.
Key takeaways
- Tooling is necessary and nowhere near sufficient.
- Unowned data turns mapping decisions into mapping guesses.
- Sign-off only counts when the signer can read the evidence.
Recognise your programme in this?
Written by the people who deliver the work. The conversation works the same way.