Deciding what to convert

Assuming that you want to convert your client files, the question remains: how much of the content within them do you want to/need to convert? You probably want to convert shelter stays, but what else? Do you need all the case notes, all the incident reports, and all the past phone numbers?

Back to consent for a moment – it’s possible that you were previously collecting some information (like health-related information) that your Legal Support is now telling you you cannot be collecting and storing in a shared database. So there might be some pieces of information that you’re not allowed to convert, even if the rest of the conversion project has been green-lighted by Legal Support.

You’ll therefore need to decide what pieces of data you’ll be converting and what you’ll decide to leave behind. If you’re hiring a third-party software developer to build a conversion tool for you, this is an important decision. In general, the more information you want to convert, the more complicated the process and the longer it will take and the more it will cost. Even without the factor of a third-party developer, more data being converted means an increased risk that something will not transfer properly.

If embarking on a data conversion project, it’s recommended that you consider carefully what your data requirements (see Term 3: Week 2) are before you proceed. It’s easy enough to say that you’ll just convert the whole database, but you may be inadvertently costing resources in order to convert a piece of data that’s ultimately not going to be important to anyone.