Every discipline eventually gets its conference. Data migration got its in the form of Data Migration Matters - and for over a decade it has been the only event in Europe exclusively devoted to the subject.
That exclusivity matters. Data migration sits at an awkward intersection: too technical for most business conferences, too business-centric for most technology events. It is a discipline that has long been underserved by the broader industry calendar - which is precisely why the field has historically underperformed.
Why a dedicated conference?
When Johny Morris launched Data Migration Matters, the motivation was the same as the one behind the PDM methodology itself: data migration had a structural problem, and the industry needed a dedicated space to address it.
The failure rate for large-scale data migration projects has stubbornly hovered between 40 and 60 percent - over time, over budget, or failing entirely. That figure has barely improved in two decades. Part of the reason is that the discipline lacks the institutional infrastructure that other areas of software delivery take for granted: shared standards, shared language, shared forums for learning from failure.
Data Migration Matters was built to provide that forum.
What the conference became
Held at the British Computer Society’s headquarters near Covent Garden in London, DMM consistently attracted industry analysts, senior managers, software vendors, and practitioners from across Europe. By its 11th edition it had established itself as a genuine community event - not a vendor showcase, but a space for practitioners to share real experience.
The recurring themes across editions reflect the enduring challenges of the field. The Responsibility Gap - the structural breakdown between IT and business that Morris identified in the first edition of PDM - has been a fixture of conference discussions since the beginning. So has the Perverse Incentive to Fail: the dynamic in fixed-price contracts that can inadvertently reward suppliers for delays rather than for resolving them.
More recent editions have addressed cloud migration, SaaS platform transitions, compliance-driven migrations, and the impact of automation on ETL design. The tools have changed. The structural problems have not.
A community built on a methodology
What distinguishes Data Migration Matters from a general technology conference is its grounding in PDM. Presentations are not vendor pitches or abstract research - they are practitioner accounts of applying a specific methodology to real projects, with real complications, in real organisations.
That grounding gives the community something unusual: a shared reference point. When practitioners at DMM talk about the Landscape Analysis, the DQR board, or the DMZ, everyone in the room knows exactly what they mean. The methodology creates the common language that makes genuine knowledge transfer possible.
This is, in miniature, exactly what PDM set out to achieve at the project level: a shared framework that allows IT and business to cooperate across the gap that would otherwise separate them.
The community continues
The Data Migration Matters conference was a foundational part of building the PDM community. That community now extends to this website, to the Hopp Academy training course, and to the growing network of PDM-certified practitioners who are listed in the Practitioners directory.
If you have delivered a migration using PDM methodology, your experience belongs in that community. The field still has a 40–60% failure rate. Every practitioner who shares what worked - and what did not - makes the next project a little more likely to succeed.