How Successful Migrations Impact the Cost of Adoption

One of the biggest challenges when planning to move operations to modern systems is the problem of what to do with existing data. If your firm has been operating for a decade or more and is attached to historical systems, this will mean a significant set of business decisions to make that will deeply impact your firm's operations and efficiency through the course of adoption of the new system and over the much longer term.

If you are using a paper based filing system, or using an application which was written in the previous two decades, and are finding it more and more difficult and expensive to maintain, you probably have been scared off from this pain when looking at moving to a new case management system.

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Will you be able to bring your existing data to the new system? This may be not be so straightforward as it seems at first glance. In most cases, the ability to carry over existing data into the new system will be quite limited. Even if you are able to bring in some of the data, what will you be able to bring over? Will it only be basic case information? Will you be able to carry over calendar information, documents, balance history or contact list, and in a way that maintains the integral relationships between your files and these pieces of data?

Not being able to migrate these items and retain the associations between them will mean your firm is forced to maintain separate systems indefinitely, leading to lost productivity, continued IT costs, and problems with consistency of your firm’s data within the disparate systems. This creates a classic illustration of marginal versus fixed costs. If your firm is able to move to a new system with existing data largely intact, the higher initial upfront (fixed) costs on a successful migration will lead to much better outcome and lower ongoing (marginal) costs for your firm in the form of greatly increased ease of adoption and ongoing productivity.

How this works in practice can be easily seen through some basic and highly conservative calculations. Suppose that your firm has 10 personnel, and the average earnings of each person for the firm is 200 dollars per day and an hour of productivity is lost each day due to maintaining parallel systems and increased overhead for switching over to the new system. The daily loss to your firm would be 250 dollars per day. This comes to 1250 dollars per week and 5000 dollars after four weeks. As shown, the costs will quickly accumulate, and their effects will be felt in other ways across the firm.

In summary, you should perform a thorough cost/benefit analysis before picking a case management system that fits the needs of your firm. Lower upfront switching costs will almost invariably mean much higher long term costs and adverse business impacts that will make switching to a new case management system more painful.


Written by Nicky Bourque, Software Engineer at MerusCase