webinarsbreadcrumb separatoreauctions-chapter-12-part-1-migrating-to-a-new-eauction-platform

In this webinar series, Chris Reddick (President and CEO of Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing), talk about the details of migrating to a new eAuction platform.

Part 1 of a 6-part series

CHRIS: Hello, Ron. How's it going today?  

RON: Great. Good morning, Chris. How you doing?  

CHRIS: Great. I'm so excited to dig in again with you on online auction platforms. This one's going to be very tactical for folks. This is talking about steps to migrate to a new auction platform. And we're not just talking about the myopic portion where you're migrating to the new platform.

what is hipaa

CHRIS: We're also looking at some of the roots of your data and some of the steps to set up and get ready for that migration and then pull the existing data if you want. And in most cases, you probably will, so that you have a seamless transition from your existing system and infrastructure to the new system and infrastructure. The business can continue to operate seamlessly. And ideally, the users have an improvement in their experience with no regression.  

RON: It's exciting, because today's the final chapter. Everything we've done up to now has really talked about making sure you get the right eCommerce auction platform. We really delved into the features and the functionality. Today we're really going to talk about the development team and how complex these migrations can be. 

what is hipaa

RON: We do a lot of eCommerce, and have for the last sixteen years. One of the things, when we migrate that data, they usually work with me a lot upfront. Since I'm SEO (search engine optimization), we're talking about making sure to have the right data for the SEO. So I get involved with them and help them build their import file.  

If you want, go into the eCommerce playlist [on our YouTube page], there's about a 15-minute video that talks about getting your product data ready for importing into an eCom platform. I can't even imagine how much more complex the data structure, the schema, the foreign keys, and the relationships of the data for an eAuction platform are are than a product on eCommerce.  

We've had some of our manufacturing eCommerce clients whose products might have 100 attributes, but for the most part, most products have an inventory account, description, long description, a few images, and then a handful of attributes. But the auction stuff, especially if you're dealing with real estate and some of those others, there could be literally hundreds or thousands of pieces of information about each auction.  

I'm going to really rely on you today, Chris, as the resident rocket scientist, to dive into the complexities of the data and how important it is to have a team that has the architectural prowess that can sift through that and somehow make sense of it, then migrated into a new auction eCommerce platform so it's all in the right place.  

CHRIS: That's right. And this is one of the things that we see because we work with a lot of businesses that are already successful. They already have some momentum within the business. Now, that's not our exclusive client. Some of our clients are really starting from scratch. And if that's the case, you can really think about this to understand how to position yourself data-wise so that you're in an optimal position for the long term. Keep in mind that we're going to be talking about some nuances that are specific to clients that we've worked with who end up having a lot of data aggregated over many years, [as well as] some of the experiences from dealing with the different data structures.  

Fundamentally, the way that I would say this, just to use a comparison: Think about moving all your pictures, or all your music, or maybe all your files. Think of all the files that you may have saved over the years. How did you organize those originally, and how detailed was that organization?  

Well, depending on the different vendors that you selected and the eAuction software that you're using right now for your eAuction system, they set something up and it may be very well done. [Or] it may be really, really bad. Either way, it's incumbent on your future partner and you as the business owner and the overall auction business, to make sure that there's a seamless process for the end-users. We don't want them to have a regression in their experience.  

One of the big things that we want to point out here is that there are different technology stacks. This could be Microsoft.net, this can be Java, it could be PHP-based, Ruby, Python. The list goes on of all the different languages on the back-end. Similarly, with the database side of things, the data persistence layer, the data itself could be persisted in a different way with each system. We could have a very complex data model that has no foreign key relationships. We've seen that before and that was always fun. And I say that with a lot of sarcasm and tongue in cheek. [There were] literally millions of records with no foreign key constraints. 

what is hipaa

CHRIS: At the end of the day, you need to work with a partner that can deal with this constructively. One of the things that's really cool about Clarity is that we don't just throw our hands up and say, “Oh, well, yeah, if you don't have any foreign keys and we can't work with this data.” 

The summary here is that the data and the way that it's stored in your current online auction platform could be a large spectrum of different outputs. It could be a significant amount of effort, or it could be a relatively small amount of effort depending on how everything is set up. One of the first things that you're going to want to do is decide if you want to bring over all the data, or if you want to bring over just a portion of the data.

what is hipaa

CHRIS: Typically, for most of our clients, based on how they're operating their business, we recommend bringing over most of the data. Anything that you can remove from the necessity to migrate is certainly going to be beneficial in many cases. A lot of times there's information that just isn't very valuable. It may not have a lot of credibility to the data, or it just might be old data. In that scenario, it would be possible to get an archived copy and have a nice backup that's available, but basically not force that data on the new system and on the users going forward.  

For example, there may be very old oneline auctions that you want to archive for recordkeeping, but maybe you just need to pull the most recent auctions from the last 24 months or 36 months, and that's totally fine. We can do that.  

One of the other things that might be necessary is keeping detailed records for the users so that they can access each of the pieces of data. One thing we've done before, in that scenario, is come up with a timeline of what data we're going to pull. Usually 12, 24, 36 months is a reasonable look-back period. But the team will also provide the ability to request more data, so they can make a request and then that can be fulfilled in a manual process because the frequency would be low.  

If you don't think the frequency would be low, you can even do things like sending out a survey to the existing customers of your eCommerce auction platform and saying, “Hey, this is what we're planning on. We're planning on a major upgrade to the site, we're looking for feedback from some of our high-frequency users and we wanted to get your thoughts on how far back is reasonable and if it's going to have a big impact on the timeline to take things live. What is your opinion? Should we go ahead and just keep it to 24 months or 12 months and just make it a lot easier to go live with this new site? Or should we go all the way back in time, possibly five, ten, 15 years back with migrating all of the data?” I think most of the time what you'll find is that the end-customer is going to be dependent on more recent data and not so much on deep historical data.  

So the other thing that we've seen with the deeper data is—this can also be really useful, at least going back 12 to 24 to 36 months—if the B2B eAuction platform has a nice way of representing the different bids and the timing of the bids and information about people's interaction with the B2B auction sites. This can be used as part of a feedback loop and making sure that we have almost a form of analytic on the site that can be really helpful as a set of data for machine learning or AI training within the application.  

You're just going to want to think about not only getting the full set of data for a time period, but also thinking ahead about things like, “Do you want historical data to train an AI or to train the machine learning so that it can better perform within the site.” 

Outside of that, I would say the other big pieces of data that make a lot of sense to bring over includes category/subcategory, associations with auctions to those categories/subcategories, any taxonomy with tags, and overall structure to the application reviews. [Also bring over] reviews of buyers and sellers and frankly, the list goes on. But ultimately being able to pull all of that historical data tends to be important for the community and being able to pull it over accurately. 

At the end of the day, we do this process in several different ways. Ultimately, the adaptive ability of the development team that you're working with on your new platform is going to be very important. So they're going to need to be able to work with some of these different systems that they may not be used to, they may not specialize in, and be able to adapt and get the data that they need.  

So, Ron, we work a lot with different APIs, but we'll also, if the APIs aren't available, or they just don't cover every single endpoint that we would need to pool all of the old data, then we'll go directly to the data persistence layer, which is usually a database. This works really well overall to be able to access everything and bring all the data over to the new eCommerce auction platform.

what is hipaa

RON: A good point of that is the governance that you have. Do you have existing governance on an old site that says you'll persist data forever? Well, then, that doesn't leave you a lot of options to start archiving stuff off, does it? So, you need to think about how this also applies to the new governance rules on the new site.  

Maybe on the new site you write in a rule in the governance that says, “We reserve the right to archive any data or eAuction or information older than 36 months.” And so now, at least going forward, you can do that. And then maybe it's Chris's great idea to send out a survey and ask their permission and tell them, “Hey, we're going to roll out this brand-new B2B auction platform. We have to migrate a lot of the data over. Don't worry, we're going to bring over all your ratings, all of your reviews, how many stars you've earned as a seller and as a buyer. We're going to pull that all over. But as far as all the old auctions and historical auctions, we're thinking maybe we'll archive off anything more than 24 to 36 months old, which would you choose?“ 

And then, give them a couple of radio buttons, don't give them carte blanche authority to just dictate everything, because then they'll ask for the moon. But if you go back and say, “We're considering these three things, place your vote on what you would do, and maybe it's only two or three or four years of data and you're not even offering it all.  

And then maybe at the bottom you put little star and say, “For those that need more historical or longer data than that, our team will offer, at a marginal fee, go retrieve that data and provide all of it for you. Because they've already dealt with taxes, they've already dealt with everything else. They've already got it on their depreciation schedule if it's a capital asset. So, they really shouldn't have to come back and get data more than two, three, four years old anyway for any data on the eAuction sites. 

Continue to Part 2 to learn about the act of migrating data.

Recent Search

HIPAA Compliance AngularJS Web Development ERP Sage Integrations Microsoft Dynamics Xamarin Framework Comparison Essential Website Features

Top Searches

B2B Supply Chain Management WooCommerce Integrations Catalog Product Tags Top B2B eCommerce Challenges Epic Integrations Optimizing Mobile Apps