Day one of the transformation programme, and the programme lead asks what should be a simple question: how many active customer records do we actually hold? Three departments give three different answers. The policy administration system says one thing, the CRM another, and nobody is quite sure what sits in the archived case files – some of which are PDFs on a legacy server, and some of which are paper in an off-site store that was last audited before GDPR existed.
The firm in this story is a composite – a mid-sized, FCA-regulated financial services business assembled from patterns that recur across the sector – but the question, and the silence that follows it, will be familiar to anyone who has sat in that first meeting. What happens over the next 90 days will largely decide whether the programme succeeds. Almost none of it involves the new system.
Days 1–15: discovery
The first fortnight is spent establishing where data actually lives, and the consistent finding is that it lives in more places than the organisation chart suggests. Core systems, departmental spreadsheets, shared drives, email archives, a document management platform from a previous transformation attempt, and the physical store. AIIM’s research gives a sense of what this mapping typically uncovers: respondents to its study on information management reported that half of their organisational data was more than five years old and likely to contain redundant, obsolete or trivial material – yet only half of organisations actively enforced a retention policy[1].
For a regulated firm, discovery is shaped by obligations as much as by ambition. FCA record-keeping requirements, ICO accountability principles and the firm’s own retention schedule define what must be found, what must be kept and what should already have been destroyed. The map produced in these two weeks becomes the reference point for everything that follows.
Days 15–40: the records audit
With the map drawn, the next month is spent establishing what each repository actually contains: what is held, in what format, under whose ownership, and against which retention period. This is the phase where the awkward discoveries surface. Customer files duplicated across systems with conflicting details. Records past retention that should have been destroyed years ago. Paper files whose existence nobody had recorded centrally.
The audit usually finds more than anyone wanted to know, and the temptation is to treat that as bad news. It is the opposite. Every problem surfaced now is a problem that will not surface during migration, at go-live, or in front of a regulator. A firm that skips this stage has not avoided the audit; it has simply deferred it to the worst possible moment.
Days 40–65: cleansing
Weeks six to nine are spent on the least glamorous work of the entire programme: resolving duplicates, completing incomplete records, reconciling contradictions and standardising formats. It is tedious, it is essential, and it is routinely under-scoped. Gartner’s research puts the cost of poor data quality at an average of $12.9 million per organisation per year[2] – a figure that describes business as usual, before a transformation comes along and amplifies every defect.
The principle the firm holds onto through this phase is simple: you do not migrate a mess into a new system. You migrate the mess’s consequences – into a platform where the errors are harder to trace, the duplicates carry new system identifiers, and the cleanup costs several times what it would have cost at source.
Days 65–90: migration prep
The final month before any data moves is given to mapping, validation rules and dry runs. This is the stage Birmingham City Council’s Oracle programme stands as the standing warning against. The project, originally budgeted at around £19 million, is now set to cost £144.4 million – more than seven times early estimates – with the council still waiting for a fully functioning system five years after its planned go-live date[3]. Grant Thornton’s audit of the programme found that payroll integration problems combined with the volume and quality of the data being migrated forced extensive retesting and drove costs higher[4].
That detail deserves emphasis. One of Britain’s most expensive system failures was not purely a technology story; data quality and migration sat at the heart of it. The composite firm’s dry runs exist precisely to find those problems while they are still cheap – a failed validation in week twelve costs a meeting; the same failure at go-live costs the programme.
What the first 90 days actually buy you
At day 90, the firm has no new system. What it has is a complete map of its information estate, an audited and cleansed record set, retention discipline applied for the first time in years, and a migration plan that has been tested against real data rather than optimistic assumptions. None of it will feature in the launch announcement. All of it is the difference between a programme that survives contact with go-live and one that joins the cautionary tales.
How Dajon helps
Dajon works inside exactly this window. We handle the discovery and audit of physical and digital records, digitise the paper that would otherwise stall the programme, cleanse and structure the data, and prepare it for migration – with FCA and ICO obligations built into the process throughout. If your transformation is approaching its first 90 days, talk to us about making them count.
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