October 4, 2004 -- Large corporate mergers create tremendous challenges for the IT organization. Whether integrating antiquated legacy systems, poorly documented and heavily modified packaged solutions' or custom applications with “unusual” structures, migrations are technically vexing. Add the undocumented manual processes embedded in the heads of a few key employees and the “delicate” political dynamic associated with post-acquisition layoffs and one has the recipe for a difficult IT integration and clear impediments to the successful operational integration of the merger.

Working with a number of leading financial institutions, CTG's new DataScrubber™ software utility reconciles and maps divergent data sets, while checking for a variety of typical migration errors. This toolset together with our experience in supporting migrations from and to a variety of packaged and proprietary solutions greatly accelerates the migration and integration process without disruption to customers or their transactional data. Mistakes in the integration that could result in lost customers, lost revenue, and customer dissatisfaction are avoided or eliminated.

According to David Ritchie, CodeLab Technology Group Founder and CEO, “We recognized the need to build a software utility to help us help our customers deal with the inevitable technical challenges caused by migrations. Given the variability of software systems and the modifications that may have made to those systems, it's not realistic to have a ‘load and go migration.' DataScrubber™ allows more efficient integration while minimizing the risk of either data loss or corruption, ensuring that migrations happen as quickly and as smoothly as possible.”

“Our experience has taught us that while businesses and industries differ, many of the problems they face are similar. The challenge is to leverage our understanding of the similarities while crafting solutions unique to a particular company,” added CodeLab Technology Group President John Francis.

“Although we have considerable experience and expertise within each of our core industries, we acknowledge that as consultants we'll always be outsiders.” First and foremost, we are technology experts. But we believe that our perspective as outsiders, combined with our experience and functional expertise, provides us with a vantage point to redefine and solve the challenges of the new, merged business entity,” he said.