There is an old saying in business, “what got us here, won’t get us there”.  At some point in the lifetime of your business you will undoubtedly outgrow the processes and the systems that helped you grow to that point and to achieve the next milestone you will need to upgrade your systems and processes.  While system migration is inevitable in the quest to stay competitive, those of us that have lived through it know that it can be one of the most challenging tasks for an organization. There are many challenges that will be faced when migrating systems: Adapting your internal processes to fit the capabilities of the new system; data migration; and integrating the new system landscape.  Fortunately, if you are reading this you have found a platform that is ideally architected for making system migration easy. In this blog post, we will discuss how Decisions can be used to assist with three common challenges of system migration.

Challenge 1: Adapting Your Internal Processes to Fit the Capabilities of a New System

This is one of the most common challenges and often the most daunting.  During the startup phase of an organization, the main concern is growing sales and there’s little concern for developing long-term scalable processes.  Keeping costs low, flexibility high, and doing whatever it takes to get the sale is all that matters. While this is the right approach during the startup phase, eventually your organization will have to migrate to a more scalable system with more scalable processes.   If the new system your migrating to is Decisions, the transition is relatively easy. Our graphical designers allow you to customize your new system to replicate your existing processes in a more scalable way. Decisions allows you to completely customize your system, without burying all the logic in hard to understand code.  With Decisions you can take your “secret code” and turn it into building blocks that are now understood and easily modified by your business users. This gives your company the agility needed to grow to the next level.

Not Migrating to Decisions? That’s ok, we have tools to help you with migration to other systems too.   One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced when doing system migrations in the past, is getting an organization to change their processes to fit into the big “out of the box solution” that we just spent millions of dollars on.  Even in the best-case scenarios, you typically are only able to get 80% of these processes to fit into these large monolithic systems, without either sacrificing some of the things that make your organization special or spending a small fortune on custom coding.  Decisions can easily connect to these systems and be used to handle those 20% of processes that make your organization special. Our no-code building blocks make it possible for you to customize whatever you need, and our clients have found that not only are they able to implement their new systems faster, but they’re also getting more useful life out of these systems.  With Decisions acting as a configuration layer that adapts better to the needs of the business overtime, you can keep these expensive large scale systems longer.

Challenge 2: Data Migration

Migrating years worth of data from one system to another can be a daunting task.  Especially since it’s not likely that the existing data that you have matches the format of the new system.  Decisions workflows and rules are ready to assist with this process. For example, we have several customers that use Decisions to clean data with batch processing.  We take data from your existing system, run rules against it to find anomalies and then either clean the anomalies or kick off workflows to bring in the responsible people.  Another way that our customers have used Decisions to help with data migration is to perform data transformation on the fly. Decisions can sit as a middle layer that uses rules to translate old data in real time and then combine by that data with data from other systems into reports.  Additionally, Decisions can be used to establish new rule-based processes that ensure all new data coming in conforms to your organization’s rules and that the relevant process owners are looped into the workflow and held accountable for keeping data clean.

Challenge 3: Integrating New System Landscapes

Ok, you’ve added a new system to your architecture, now you want to bring people together and engage them in a workflow, report, or project.  Decisions has native integrations to many tools and we are commonly used as a kind of orchestration layer in organizations. Decisions also has very open API’s and our workflows and rules can be called from other applications with webservices.  We have several customers come to us that migrate different departments to different applications at different times but want to keep users engaged across one common platform. In these examples, Decisions has built both reports and workflows that allow users to work in the platform they are comfortable in.  For example, we might have the sales team interacting with Decisions via a table in Salesforce, while the HR team interacts with Decisions via Peoplesoft. The options are limitless, and they can each be quickly designed, modified and implemented with our graphical no code designers.

The are many more examples of how Decisions can be used to help with system migration.  If you’d like to learn more, please reach out to us at sales@decision.com to schedule your personalized demo today.