All businesses collect data. We collect a variety of information on our customers, clients, employees, vendors, products, services, finances, and much more. As our business grow, we continually collect additional information and will store vast amounts of data.

All businesses collect data. We collect a variety of information on our customers, clients, employees, vendors, products, services, finances, and much more. As our business grow, we continually collect additional information and will store vast amounts of data.

As our business expands and we continue to collect information, we tend to outgrow the systems, software applications, and servers we may be using to collect and store our data. This means we will eventually need to migrate our data to something more suitable. So instead of dreading the data migration, think of it as a wonderful opportunity. An opportunity to:

• Adopt software/hardware that can handle today’s and tomorrow’s business needs
• Unify and bring all your data from different sources into a single universal database, thus centralizing your data instead of having many disparate systems
• “Tidy up” and purge unwanted or unnecessary things
• Address any industry or data-specific laws and regulations (e.g. FTC act, GBL, HIPAA etc.)
• Introduce best practices for data encryption or create a stronger cyber security plan

Depending on the complexity of your business and your budget, you may elect to capitalize on these opportunities at once or take a phased approach whereby you will perform smaller data migrations over time while integrating new software and hardware that better suits your needs. Either way, you’ll be glad you did as some of the benefits include:

• Increased speed and performance (in hardware, software or both)
• Improved security
• Higher efficiency by eliminating redundant or obsolete information and eliminating redundant data entry
• Increased data quality (accuracy, completeness, and reliability)
• Additional reporting capabilities
• Potentially reducing spend and increase savings
• Minimizing the risk of doing business
• Increased scalability and growth potential
• Gaining a competitive advantage

Sounds great, right? Of course it does, but it doesn’t stop there because all of this ultimately leads to:

• Increase revenue, decreased spend, and increased profits
• Happier customers/clients and employees
• Less client churn rates and employee turnover

So, if you are outgrowing your environment and you are thinking about doing a data migration now or in the near future, it would make sense for your business to take advantage of these opportunities to maximize the positive effect your data migration can have on your business.

After all, data helps your business figure out what is working and what is not. It helps you see patterns and trends, generate insights, and create strategic plans to improve the business. If you take this opportunity to create a more centralized data model it will help your business address any concerns it may have while positioning the business for more growth and success.

If you are not sure where to start, we suggest you start by thinking about the following: What data and how much historical data should your business migrate? Should your business just migrate business critical information, all your data from the beginning or something in between? You may want to use your biggest challenges and future goals can help you determine what information is needed. You may find it helpful to avoid collecting unnecessary data and wasting the time of those collecting and trying to analyze the data. Most often, all your historical data is not necessary to migrate but it may need to be accessed on rare occasions. A simple solution is to store that data elsewhere that can be easily retrieved when needed. This can save a lot of time and effort during the migration which will reduce cost.

If you are looking for expert data migration help, look no further…Open Professional Group has all of your data migration needs covered! Schedule your FREE consultation and let’s discuss how your data migration can be completed to best suit your business needs today and in the future.

Click here to learn more about OPG data migration services.

<code>What We’ve Been Up To</code>

Here is just a quick taste of the many successful happenings in our web and mobile software work at OPG for the last month. We like to feature a few key successes to keep the list short, so this is just a taste of the amazing effort of the OPG team recently.

• OPG onboarded several new clients in the last month. The focus areas range from consulting to system architecture and planning and even includes a new platform takeover and ongoing support (this is where we step in where another developer has left off and take the project forward, seamlessly). It’s exciting to welcome these new firms into the OPG family!
• OPG has been helping several clients replace and improve their underperforming or non-redundant hosting infrastructure. Even the best made web applications need a hosting environment that can handle the volume of traffic a business generates and be ready to handle any unexpected system issues. These actions include planning and buildout of the architecture with hosting partners, platform migration, testing and go live rollout.
• Rebuilds are in fashion, so it seems. OPG is helping a few of its clients rebuild their old web applications and native iOS and Android apps to take advantage of newer technology, solve their “I wish it did this” list, improve efficiency and ease of use, and add new features.
• Dashboards are great starting points for web applications as they provide a high-level overview of what is happening within the application and business. Dashboards can provide summaries, trends, and data analytics for the application but most importantly, dashboards also let the users take action on that data. OPG created a few dashboards for several clients to provide valuable insights to their users. The dashboards also help with user flow by getting dashboard users quickly to action based on information identified.
• OPG powered out a brand new secure API for one of its clients that allows direct integration between the client and one of its partners. The API deployment (by doing work with machines) is planned to save over 200 man hours of manual effort per month! That’s 2400 man hours a year! That’s crazy cost savings through technology with just one API!
• OPG is in the planning and analysis phase with a new client in the creation of a custom Point of Sale (POS) platform with an integrated customer waiver module. It’s early going, but so far, super exciting!