Series 13 - The Data Debt Decision: Why Your ERP Migration Is Automating the Wrong Things

There is a phrase that captures the most consequential risk in modern ERP migration programmes more precisely than any technical specification: you are not migrating your data. You are automating your mistakes at light speed. A legacy ERP operating on poor-quality data produces errors slowly, in batches, with the natural friction of the system providing some degree of human review opportunity. A m...

It is one of the most consequential arguments in enterprise technology programme management — and it is almost never framed explicitly as a debate. Instead, it is resolved by default, in scope management conversations that happen under timeline pressure, without adequate representation from the functions that will live with the consequences. The argument is this: should ERP migration programmes be...

The dominant model for data in ERP migration programmes is Extract, Transform, Load: take the data from the legacy system, apply whatever transformations are needed to make it structurally compatible with the new system, and load it. The model is technically competent. It reliably produces a new system populated with data. It does not reliably produce a new system populated with good data. The cri...

There is a specific mistake that appears in ERP migration programmes with a consistency that should, by now, have made it famous. Organisations invest tens of millions in a migration to a modern platform. The programme executes. The system goes live. And the data quality problems that existed in the legacy system — the inconsistent master data, the unmapped account structures, the incomplete tax c...