What is data migration, and why is it a real issue for users of enterprise content management (ECM)?

Organisations have a requirement to manage their information – be that their documents, their engineering drawings, their NHS scans, whatever it may be. And as we know, many rightly look to ECM or a good Content Records Management system to manage all that content.

The reality is, though, that in a lot more cases than people care to think about, their information is housed in legacy systems – which could be as simple as a file system, an older document management system or perhaps a combination of both (or more). They want to be able to wrap that information in some intelligent data so they can find it at a later date, bringing it into their enterprise repository, with the vision that the enterprise repository is going to be where all of their core information is going to be: maybe research information, scans, documents they work on a day to day basis, reports – all this information needs to be held somewhere so they can go and find it.

Here’s the problem: the idea of the repository is a sound one and we recommend it. But just how do you get all that important information held in these legacy systems into that corporate repository? This is made more complicated by the fact that in many cases the older systems are coming to end-of-life – and you don’t want to lose any of that information.

So, welcome to the data migration issue. If valuable information the business needs or wants to keep is on a platform that may be about to stop being supported, what can you do?

More and more companies in this situation are turning to specialist, dedicated content migration services, like the SynApps one. We work with you to understand what information it is you want to maintain, what the data model is that sits around it, what information you wrap around your content so that you can go and search for it and retrieve it. That will allow us to then take the information perform a data-mapping between the source and the target system (the ‘source’ being the legacy system, the ‘target’ being the brand shiny new car).

So what we also need to do, as well as understand the data, is to understand the different content types that you have to ensure that you are able to view that information in the new system. I do have to say that in some cases that information may be held in a format that is no longer available and there aren’t tools to display that information, e.g. some old word-processing format. But we work to salvage data in that situation too.

In the next SynApps blog, I’d like to delve a bit more into the details of the specific help we can give you on this important issue. But I hope you agree that it is a real challenge – and I also hope you have started to think about how you will cope with it too.

In the second part of our guest blog from partner EMC, Jean Van Vuuren of its Information Intelligence Group tells us more about how standards for document sharing can help the NHS as it tries to meet national efficiency and data sharing targets

As we know, a key goal of the health secretary and the current stated direction of travel for the NHS is to be ‘paperless by 2018’. But what people don’t realise is in the average Trust today, a huge amount of information is still being managed in paper format. The historical medical records that go around the hospital and follow the patient are often all in that medium – and that is, obviously, very expensive and cumbersome to manage.

To help, EMC, working with companies like SynApps, provides the ability to digitise that information on our scanning platform – but more importantly, manage it and make it available for both the clinician and the patient at the point of care.

And I think Trusts have finally taken on the concept of putting electronic document management or records management systems in place to manage medical records – which is great news. Here’s the next problem: now I have got important content electronic, how do we make it available beyond my Trust?

I want to suggest that a technology called XDS, for ‘cross document sharing’ is ideally suited to help Trusts start sharing innovation, as well as information – in a secure controlled manner, and on their own terms. XDS is basically a repository where you store your documents, and where you can profile them and mark and store them in industry standard ways. What comes with that is the registry – a mechanism, like a large phonebook if you will, that you make available and say, ‘I’ve got all these patient documents and images from radiology available; I would like to make it available for sharing.’

The point is that as long as another Trust or provider supports XDS it can easily and efficiently communicate with you via XDS – and they can then start sharing the information between multiple organisations. To do this (in very top-level terms), they can use XDS to set up an ‘access registry’ and get publishing information they want to share to other Trusts within a region or even nationally.

I think that is going to be key to the next phase of making patient information available across the NHS. We will see Trusts do this on the Internet, or via a secure mechanism from the Web, easily as it is supporting a standard format XDS. Imagine, for example, that one Trust has an XDS registry published and one of their patients is in another Trust; you can then go and request that patient’s information via XDS and get it shared securely and quickly.

So if you are looking at investing in any system that you hope will take you toward that paperless goal, it is sensible to make sure the system can provide XDS capability. I think you’re going to need it – and I think it’s going to be very useful for you too.