Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 11
Migration
… an old system must ever have two advantages over a new
one; it is established and it is understood.
—C.C. Colton,
English cleric, writer, and collector
From a management point of view, a migration project involves spending
money to go from Point A to Point A. For example, one has had an
Accounts Receivable system on the mainframe and now one will have an
Account Receivable system running on an alternate operating system and
database. What exactly has the business gained? This is important because
many IT (information technology) projects that get funded are maintenance
or migration projects, and such projects can be expensive.
Migration brings to mind the annual movement of birds from cooler
locales to warmer lands, or salmon jumping upstream, or turtles rushing
on shore — a natural, seasonal, programmed routine. If there are similar
patterns to the migration in the software world, they are driven by major
technological climactic changes, which happen once in a while. In the
past few decades, examples of some of these changes include the move
from mainframes to client/server, the Y2K migrations to packaged enter-
prise software, or the move to Web technologies.
It would be a fair statement that migration is about change, but not
fundamental change. It is like old wine in new bottles.
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