WORKING IN PARTNERSHIP, CGI AND DATANOMIC DELIVER DATA MIGRATION SUCCESS TO FIRSTASSIST INSURANCE SERVICES LTD
A combination of partnership, careful evaluation of options, risk management and the right choice of tools delivers success for a critical data migration project.
When FirstAssist agreed terms with a leading financial institution to manage their travel insurance business they were aware of the challenge; the project was high profile, high impact, had aggressive implementation timescales and involved a potentially complex data migration requirement.
With only a two month timescale, they approached CGI, one of their key IT Solution partners; a relationship which had grown following the successful implementation of CGI’s Insurance Solution, GIOS, in 2005.
The Client
FirstAssist Insurance Services Limited (FISL) is an insurance intermediary with an established client base generating annual premiums of £150 million. Founded in April 2003, it employs 500 people across its offices in Sutton and Plymouth. The company provides both white label and branded insurance products to an extensive client base, including some of the UK’s largest financial service organisations.
The Challenge
With a tight two month timescale, FISL were faced with a complex data migration, with the information to be derived from multiple policy administration systems and correspondingly multiple data sources. As one of their key IT Solution partners, FISL turned to CGI for help in meeting their challenge.
Both companies immediately worked together to evaluate the feasibility of various implementation and data conversion options. A number of very different approaches were considered ranging from full data migration to the GIOS policy administration system to a range of manual based options.
The Solution
Having considered all options from a risk, business impact and cost perspective, the integrated project team proposed a pragmatic solution, which carefully balanced risk and business impact and furthermore afforded sufficient time to ensure that there was a high level of control and probability of success at outset.
CGI, in turn, engaged the assistance of one of their business partners, Datanomic, and proposed the use of Datanomic’s dn:Director product, a Java-based system that assists with accelerated data analysis, profiling, cleansing and transformation within a comprehensive framework. dn:Director offers an integrated approach to data manipulation, enabling all functionality to be accessible in a single system, providing the user with an efficient environment to enhance, monitor and maintain data quality.
A cost benefit analysis illustrated that utilisation of the tool both reduced risk and cost due to the savings accrued from reduced labour costs.
The chosen solution was based upon the creation of a data staging area, complete with a simple user friendly querying system that effectively mirrored the policy administration system and enabled the FirstAssist customer-facing staff to easily and seamlessly service their new client’s business.
The Results
All parties; FirstAssist and their customers, Datanomic and CGI worked effectively and in partnership. The result was a successful migration delivered on schedule and to budget.
Using dn:Director and CGI’s expertise, complex data mapping scenarios were identified early along with a number of potentially serious data inconsistencies; the accelerated tool-based analysis provided early identification of issues and afforded time to assess and manage the impact and of course enhanced the data quality.
“Ironically, in a standard data migration project you probably wouldn’t have identified as many of these issues. Thanks to the transparent environment of dn:Director and the ability to visualise every step of the migration process, a number of problems, some of which were significant in business terms, were identified and addressed up front,” commented Nick Jenner, FirstAssist’s IT Director.
Less than two months after it began, a major project has been implemented on time, migration completed and the migrated data successfully reviewed.
“It was an ambitious task, well managed and de-risked by a careful choice of partners, strategy and tools,” added Mr Jenner. |
