BI platform migration is rarely just about replacing one platform with another. Yet too often, organizations approach it as a technical upgrade rather than the strategic transformation it truly represents.
After over five years at The Information Lab, supporting enterprise clients such as UBS and Johnson & Johnson, and now working closely with partners and executives on commercial strategy, I’ve seen a consistent pattern. The decision to migrate is usually triggered by:
Cost
Capability gaps
Vendor strategy.
The success of that migration, however, is not as cut and dry. Success depends on:
Governance
Adoption
Clarity of ownership
Long-term vision.
The organizations that thrive treat BI migration as an opportunity to reset standards, rationalise content, and redefine how data drives decisions. Those that don’t, often recreate the same challenges on a new platform.
This post explores the strategic considerations leaders should evaluate when planning and executing a BI platform migration, beyond the technology itself.
Why do BI Platform decisions matter?
With the rapid pace of technological advancement, particularly in AI, customers and businesses are increasingly evaluating where they should focus their efforts over the next 3, 5, or even 10 years. Organizations must assess whether their existing platform still serves its purpose, meets stakeholder demands, and can scale with future needs. Key questions include:
Does the current platform adequately answer business questions?
Do we have the in-house expertise to build and maintain reports effectively?
Is the vendor continuing to innovate and keep pace with the market?
Migrating from one BI platform to another requires a significant investment not only in software costs, but also in people, time, and long-term capability.
What are the challenges of migrating?
No migration is straightforward. Platform architectures can vary in features and code logic, so experts must be involved in implementation. There is no one-click solution to migrate dashboards from one platform to another, meaning content must be refactored and rebuilt, not copied. Regardless of the chosen platform, a business needs to ensure clean, visualization-ready data and that visual best practices are followed during the development process.
What are the different approaches to a migration?
In my five years at The Information Lab, I’ve seen two distinctly different approaches for migration:
Lift-and-shift: recreating dashboards exactly as they exist today
Enhance and optimize: rebuilding content to take advantage of the new platform’s capabilities
Whilst a pure lift-and-shift has its benefits, I always encourage businesses to seriously consider the alternative approach. Lift and shift is tempting due to the increased speed of the migration, but you miss out on the opportunity to improve the content and fully leverage the functionality of the new platform. Change management is a key part of this process, to ensure the new platform is adopted appropriately.
Steps for a successful migration
At The Information Lab, we have extensive experience delivering migrations of varying complexity. They require time, expertise, and careful planning and will often involve:
Large volumes of dashboards and reports
Multiple data sources and complex data models
Rebuilding governance from scratch, including user access, permissions and row-level security.
When discussing migration projects with organizations, I identify three key phases:
Phase 1: Pre-Migration Assessment
Before touching any dashboards or data models, it’s critical to understand the current state of the BI landscape and where it’s falling short.
Identify pain points What’s not working today? Common issues often include slow performance, low adoption, inconsistent metrics, or reports that no longer support how the business actually operates.
Content inventory and assessment Take stock of what exists before deciding what should move.
Identify high-value and business-critical reports
Flag reports used for executive or operational decision-making
Remove or archive stale, unused, or duplicate content
This step reduces technical debt and ensures efforts focus on delivering the most business value.
Phase 2: Planning and Strategy
With a clear understanding of the current environment, the focus shifts to defining what “better” looks like and how to get there.
Requirements gathering Engage stakeholders early to understand expectations and opportunities for improvement.
Interview dashboard consumers and creators
Identify gaps, inefficiencies, and unmet business needs
Understand the business impact if the migration is delayed or not completed
Identify early adopters who can champion the new platform
Timelines and constraints Migration timelines are often driven by external pressures.
When must business-critical reports be available in the new platform?
What level of downtime is acceptable (if any)?
Is there a hard decommission date for the legacy BI platform?
Migration strategy Define the overall approach based on scope, maturity, and available capacity.
Lift and Shift: replicate existing reports with minimal change
Lift and Enhance: redesign reports to improve usability, performance, or governance
Resourcing and capability Be realistic about what the team can support.
Do we have the required technical and visualization expertise internally?
Is external support needed to accelerate delivery or reduce risk?
BI platform implementation Before beginning the migration effort, ensuring you have your BI platform set up correctly is essential. This might include, but not limited to, project hierarchy, authentication, site roles, data source connections, governance, permissions and row-level security.
Phase 3: Migration & Rollout
Execution is where planning meets reality. Migration approaches typically fall into one of three patterns.
Total migration A full, enterprise-wide transition to the new BI platform, often driven by platform decommissioning or standardization initiatives.
Partial migration Running two BI platforms in parallel, commonly seen in organizations with siloed teams or varying levels of BI maturity.
New implementation Introducing a BI platform where no specialized platform previously existed, or rolling out an existing enterprise BI solution to a new business unit.
Each approach requires careful change management to drive adoption and ensure users trust the new reporting environment. Therefore, enablement is critical to ensure long-term success.
Analysts who have spent years working in one platform will not be immediately productive in a new one. They require:
Knowledge transfer - training on how to use the new platform
Guidance on best practices
Support to answer business questions efficiently
Documentation
This enablement takes time and must be led by experts. The goal is to ensure that the organization is set up for long-term success, where the return on investment is realized over years, not months.
What are the costs you must consider?
One of the biggest challenges we face is helping customers understand the cost structure of migrations. Migration requires people, time, and expertise, all of which carry cost. What constitutes “a lot of money” varies greatly between organizations, but the underlying effort remains the same.
While software licensing can be significant, it typically has little impact on the cost of the migration effort. Migration costs are driven by factors such as:
The volume and complexity of the content (dashboards and data sources) to be migrated.
How much of that content is still relevant.
The level of experience and expertise within the internal team.
Even organizations with relatively few end users may have hundreds of reports that need to be rebuilt.
The cost of adopting a new BI platform does not end with the license purchase. A lack of understanding around this is often a barrier, both with customers and occasionally with vendors, where the complexity of migrations may be underestimated.
Timelines, Deadlines, and Resource Planning
Migrations almost always come with deadlines. For example, if the licenses for the legacy BI platform expires in July and planning starts in January, this leaves a maximum of six to seven months to complete the migration project.
Smaller environments may be manageable with minimal resources. Larger environments with 100+ reports will require careful prioritization and multiple resources, especially when some dashboards can be rebuilt quickly but others may take several days. With tight deadlines, resource allocation directly impacts cost.
Change Management and User Adoption
Change management is a major component of any migration. End users will experience changes in URLs, visual design, navigation and the features and functionality of the new BI platform. Supporting users through this change requires clear communication and training whilst demonstrating the benefits of the new BI platform over and above the previous. Without this, adoption and value realization are at risk.
12. Conclusion
BI migrations have impact beyond technical projects. These organizational changes require clear strategy, realistic expectations, and investment in people as much as platforms. The most successful migrations start with understanding pain points, prioritizing what truly matters, and pairing execution with enablement to ensure long-term value.
With industry-leading consultants, The Information Lab has helped businesses of all sizes with platform planning, deployment, and enablement. If you're considering a new business intelligence strategy, reach out to our team at info@theinformationlab.com.
Over the next few months, we’ll be releasing a dedicated series diving deeper into the practical aspects of a migration and how to ensure a successful execution.