Over the last two weeks, Jean provided great information about what is really going on during a conversion. Hopefully, that conversation gets you thinking about all the of work that needs to happen on the client side, as well as all of the work that's involved with data validation and reconciliation. As he mentioned, it's important to get a handle on the data conversion scope. IT leaders that are out there reading this might have to negotiate about this with the business. It’s hard for business leaders that maybe haven't gone through the data conversion type work before to grasp really what the impact will be. You are in a position to help them understand the pros and cons and sell this message that the less data you bring forward, the better your system runs.
We’ve already covered change resistance and the complexity of data conversions, so now let’s dive in to technical development. At a high-level, this has been a major challenge in every single CloudSuite project. It comes down to the volume of integrations and extensions that organizations have amassed over the last 10, 15, 20 years, as well as the very short time in which all those have to get rebuilt and retrofitted. Secondly, they do have to get rebuilt because you're dealing with on-prem or hosted, versus a multi-tenant cloud. This is especially true when it comes to integrations and interfaces since you’ll need CloudSuite to talk to other business applications. It always important to remember that with any cloud-based app, the technical approach to making things happen is really different than with an on-prem system. It’s a matter of the paradigm of direct database access versus making web calls and moving data around as business objects, rather than as individual rows and columns.
