Data migrations stall when cutover decisions are overlooked, not because moving rows is hard

A common assumption holds that switching to new business software is just a weekend file transfer, but the real difficulty lies in judgment calls embedded in the move. Founder Justin Pennington of Infraxio argues that teams must decide which historical records are worth carrying over, versus archiving, and which duplicate entries refer to the same company or contact. Field meanings also need reconciling, since terms like status or customer may mean different things across old and new tools. Unofficial spreadsheets holding exceptions and off-system pricing can quietly drive decisions and should be treated as in scope. He recommends setting a firm date after which the old system becomes read-only, so people don't keep splitting updates between two systems.