The rationalization and update of legacy systems can be difficult tasks requiring a great deal of IT time, management commitment, and company expense. However, some insurers in the life and property/casualty industry in London that migrated data from legacy systems found the benefits of increas-ed efficiencies, long-term cost savings, and enhanced management information systems are well worth the effort. Among the various challenges they faced were data cleanup and legacy systems creat-ed as a result of mergers and acquisitions. The following case studies de-scribe the hurdles they encountered and how they overcame them to achieve their goals.

Challenge: Data Cleanup
Chris Clegg, the former program manager for Prudential plc, the U.K. life company, saw the difficulties involved in doing a data migration in-house and the problems with migrating old data because he was in charge of the migration of two 30-year-old legacy mainframe systems. (When Clegg was interviewed, he was Prudentials program manager. At the end of April, his contract with Prudential ended and he is currently freelancing for other companies.) The program, completed in 2001, involved moving old data onto a smaller, more flexible, and robust client services system, which provided additional functionality for further growth, says Clegg.

Essentially, Prudential wanted to upgrade its old systems, which were slow, hard to maintain, and expensive, and move to newer technology that provides scalability, Web browsers, and report writing capability, he says. Making changes to old systems and maintaining them is expensive. It takes longer and is harder to do.
The main issue of data migration of legacy systems is getting the data across from the old system to the new and preserving the integrity of the data, he says.