Migrating your company's data

Hello all,

Unfortunately, I doubt people read my boring ERP Hype in America paper, but I think it is very important so I want to re-cap the highlights of the paper because many people simply don't know. 

As company's expand they tend to buy software.  Depending on the sales person, the software they buy can be a monthly subscription or up to millions of dollars.  My paper addresses this.  Do you really need all that software?   I know a large company I worked for  is uninstalling some multi-million dollar software they purchased a few years ago.  

Now they have this new software, but their data is in an old system and has to be moved into the new software.   Here's the part that I just can't understand... they now buy more software and hire more people to move the data from the old system to the new system.  The people build plans, have meetings, plan everything, report everything and then begin to move the data.  I can not, for  the life of me, understand why they do that.  The last massive migration  I did was  30 days long beginning to end.  It would have been 6 months to a year anywhere else.

So... if your still reading ... If your company is doing a massive migration, or has to automate data transfers daily and it takes a long time, I would really, really appreciate a tour of why your data migration or ETL project is going that way.  In all honesty, I would like to understand what I am missing.  Would you please consider inviting me to learn your method?

Thanks!