Laurent Dresse, Data Governance Evangelist:
We often see that companies think they are tied to this vendor or solution for the rest of their life. When you will be selecting your solution, it’s very important to understand what is the export or migration easiness of their content. Because if you don’t have a tool that fulfills all your expectations, for sure, you will not drive adoption.
And if you do not drive adoption, you don’t use the tool and you have this frustration loop that is growing and growing and growing.
So for me, I would say it should never be an issue to move from one application to another.
- If you are tight with a difficult platform or complex platform, reexport everything
- Re-think which platform will fulfill your needs, the next one, and then
- Reassess what is your model or your modeling approach
Because never try to replicate what you have in your previous platform in the new one. It’s an absolute mistake!
So take this opportunity to rethink and then reconstruct everything in the new platform. And it means that in your new platform, new vendor, you should also make sure that they have these importing capabilities which are available, I would say, for free and off hands.
Because it’s an important aspect that you need to leverage what has been done into the new platform because it will accelerate, of course, the implementation and potentially the adoption of your new solution.
So never be afraid to move from one to another. Make sure that when you select your platform – the initial platform, you have importing exporting capabilities available and in the new one you have the same importing exporting capabilities which will allow you to accelerate into migration and make sure that you can leverage all the content you create.
But again, take the opportunity to reassess, rethink your modeling and bring maybe a different perspective into your new platform.
And also, do not be afraid to explain to your organization why you moved from platform A to platform B.
Because no one expects a new platform every day in their environment, but if they expect some value, which is not delivered by the first one, explain that you move to the second one to bring additional value
What I would also say is when you decide to implement a data catalog platform to support your data governance initiative, you have to make sure that you understand the value you want to bring and who will be your users at the end of the day.
