Risk-aware Migration of Legacy Data Structures

The maintenance and evolution of legacy applications and legacy data structures poses a significant challenge for many organizations that rely on large-scale information systems, e.g. in the financial services domain: Not only is the budget for modernizations that add more technical stability and flexibility than business functionality often slim, but it is also difficult to understand and design the best migration strategies for a large and grown system landscape. We report on the experiences from a migration project at a large bank that pursued a value-based approach, in which migration efforts were first focused on a small set of business processes that were identified as most crucial for the enterprise. The migration strategies developed and validated in this pilot phase could later be successfully applied to the larger system landscape.