What is BI Migration?

BI Migration is the process of transitioning BI assets from a legacy BI platform to a modern BI platform such as Tableau, PowerBI, ThoughtSpot or Looker etc.  

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Why do Organizations Consider BI Migration?

Here are the key reasons, organizations are increasingly transitioning to modern BI platforms:

1. Data First Culture‍

Leaders across organizations are pushing for Data First Culture, where every single employee is enabled with BI insights to make the right decision. It is not a stretch to say that every job is a data job today. With that vision in mind, data leaders consider migrating to a BI platform that is scalable enough to make data insights accessible to every single employee.  

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2. Significant Cost Reduction

Supporting, maintaining, and scaling older BI solutions could get significantly expensive over time. There could be economies in moving to consumption-based licensing. Out-of-the-box data & analytics capabilities of modern BI platforms can save a considerable number of hours spent in cleaning data and building reports. Modern subscription-based BI platforms can also reduce administration and platform management costs significantly.

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3. Advanced BI Capabilities

Newer BI platforms provide modern capabilities such as self-service analytics or integration, comprehensive drill down, and data science tools, while continuously adding a host of AI capabilities into the platform – such as ThoughtSpot’s Search GPT and AI-Generated Answers, Salesforce Tableau’s Ask Data, Explain Data and Einstein GPT capabilities or Microsoft Power BI’s connection to Azure Cognitive Services for Test Analytics, Sentiment Analysis.

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4. Platform Consolidation

Some organizations have so many different BI platforms in use, which can lead to a significant increase in cost to manage or support so many different platforms. There can be BI platforms that organizations may inherit, because of a merger or acquisition. Many times, data leaders consider limiting the number of BI platforms to just 1 or 2.

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5. Enterprise-Wide Cloud Migration‍

Organizations have been undergoing enterprise-level cloud migration, which creates a natural need for BI platforms to migrate to the same cloud platform. For   example, an organization moving to Azure may consider Power BI as its preferred BI platform.

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Blend360 Can Help Ensure a Successful BI Migration

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At Blend360, we believe that BI Migration is one of the most strategic BI initiatives undertaken by data & analytics leaders. Blend360, a premier data analytics consulting & services firm, has world class BI capabilities, which has consulted and transitioned multiple customers from legacy BI platforms to modern BI platforms such as Microsoft (Power BI), Salesforce(Tableau), or ThoughtSpot.

We believe that BI Migration is an opportunity to make significant improvements in BI experience. We also think that:

• Successful BI migration should consider the range of analytical capabilities which a new platform can offer. A direct lift and shift may not be a good ROI case.
• At Blend360 – we not only help our customers move the content to new platforms but also ensure that customers maximize the benefits of using modern BI platform.  
• BI Migration can be an opportunity to improved dashboards for design, utility, scalability & adoption. In addition, this is a time for the organization to review the reporting data layer and KPIs to ensure that they are relevant, consistent, and documented.
• Successful BI Migration is NOT ONLY about migrating assets from older platforms to modern platforms but also about significantly increasing adoption and user-engagement post migration and driving organization growth in a changing environment.

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Blend360's BI Migration Approach

At Blend360, we use a proven and structured approach in BI migration projects. Here is the outline of our BI Migration approach.

Our BI Migration approach includes the following stages.

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1. Pre- Migration

During this stage, our team helps our customers pull the inventory of all the reports and data sources which exist in the legacy BI platform. Our team uses automated scripts to generate the inventory

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2. Review BI Assets

During this phase, our team assesses the reports and data sources that are potential candidates for migration based on the following criteria:

• Recency and Frequency: Stratify reports based on how recently they were used (6Mo, 12Mo, 1 Year, 2 Years).  How often are they used (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly)?
• Duplication and Rationalization: Duplicate reports evolve over time and can be confusing to users.  Are there ways to consolidate these reports to  make it easier for users?
• Value: Are these reporting assets still relevant and expected to be relevant to the business?  Are they truly driving growth and insights?  

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3. Planning and Prioritization

Our team recommends simplifying the migration process by planning the migration in multiple phases. There are multiple factors that can affect the timelines and/or phases of the migration, such as:

• How many assets are we trying to migrate?
• Similarities of source and/or destination platforms
• Is the underlying source data already moved?
• Enterprise level migration cut-off dates
• Which ones are higher priority or more critical (ABC analysis)?

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4. Migration

Blend360 has a proven iterative end-to-end BI delivery process which helps ensure consistent and user-centric delivery to a high standard of quality. Our  team can use accelerators, in-house solutions & our proven repeatable delivery process, to expedite the migration,whereas in other cases, our team can build the content in the new platform and validate the reporting assets through UAT and Testing.  Our team also ensures that the appropriate governance and access control policies are in effect on the newly migrated content.  

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5. Notification

Once validated BI assets are available in the modern BI platform. Our team can collaborate with the client team in a) announcing the availability of the new platform and b) planned shut down from the older platform.  

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‍‍Blend360 BI Consulting & Enablement Services

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We believe successful BI migration is not about having the assets available in the new platform, but rather, it is about increased adoption of the new BI platform. Blend360 enables our customers by providing BI Consulting & Enablement Services such as:

• BI Training & Workshops
• BI  Strategy, Vision & Roadmap Consulting
• Platform Content & Data Governance Consulting
• BI Product Evaluation

To learn more about how our BI solutions can impact your business, please reach out.