The State of Iowa and Workday in conjunction with governing.com shared the State’s journey to the cloud over the past several years.
During the presentation Matthew Rensch, reviewed the State’s Workday implementations at the DOT, ISU, and the State of Iowa Government and shared lessons learned over the course of the projects. One of the three most important lessons learned was regarding data conversion. This is what he had to say:
“Data Conversion is another piece. It was probably the single largest headache for us at the DOT.
Understanding what our legacy data was, how it was used, what it was defined as, and how it fits into Workday is not something you want to do on your own. It is not something you want to brute force through.
Your IT shops will definitely tell you, ‘Oh yeah, we know where our data is. We know what our data is.’ Once you start to dig into it, you will quickly find that it’s not that simple and it’s not that easy. Again, this is another partner that we partner with. We’re partnering with a company called Premier out of Chicago.
And I’ll tell you, on the DOT implementation, the single point of headache and problem we had was with the data conversion efforts. I have spent 1/10th of the time on data conversion efforts for the entire state then I did for one agency at the DOT.
The data conversion piece of it has been the easiest thing so far because Premier came in, they worked our staff both business and IT. They went through the workbooks, they understood what our current data was, and they did the work to figure out how the data fit into Workday.
They did all of the technical work and what they would pass it back to us are those things that come back as errors for us to fix. So, something that didn’t map, we go out and look to see and go out and fix those. Before we were doing it all. Now, we’re only doing small piece and this part of it has been huge. “
While we’re honored about the amazing unsolicited feedback regarding our services, the data difficulties at the DOT Matthew discussed are the same difficulties that most organizations encounter during implementations and should be focused on when planning an implementation.
For more great insights from Matthew and Sherry Amos from Workday, the entire presentation can be found here.
Contact us for more information about Premier's Workday data migration services.
