When a hospital migrated patient records to a new clinical management platform, the technical transfer succeeded. Every patient had a record in the new system. But six months later, clinicians discovered that specialist treatment notes were no longer linked to the diagnostic imaging that informed them.

The clinical context - the ‘why’ behind treatment decisions - had been broken. The health service spent eighteen months manually reconstructing relationships while managing emerging clinical safety risks.

In banking, a different migration failure unfolded. During an upgrade of a core banking system, transaction records migrated cleanly - balances, histories and timestamps intact. What did not survive were the metadata markers indicating legal holds.

The records still existed but the controls that restricted access to certain funds had disappeared, exposing the organisation to regulatory and anti-money-laundering risk.

These failures share a common cause. Records migration was treated as a technical exercise rather than as a governance and evidentiary problem. Australia’s new AS5393 standard (Records and information management - Migration of authoritative data, information and records between systems) responds directly to this gap, reframing migration as a question of authority, context and trust rather than data movement alone.

What distinguishes AS5393 from existing records and information management standards is not that it introduces new principles but that it applies them explicitly to migration. Rather than treating migration as an implementation detail to be managed by technology teams, the standard frames it as a discrete, high-risk activity that requires its own governance, planning, validation and assurance.

It does not replace established records management, information governance or system standards; instead, it operates across them, focusing on the point where policy intent, record-keeping requirements and system behaviour collide. In doing so, AS5393 makes explicit the decisions that are often made implicitly during system change and requires those decisions to be documented, tested and defensible.

Records migration is not uniform. The consequences of failure differ distinctly across sectors, even when the technical task appears similar.

In government, migration is often driven by machinery-of-government change, system consolidation or long-term preservation requirements. When a function transfers between agencies, records must migrate with it - not merely as files, but as evidence of lawful decision-making. Authority, provenance and administrative context must remain intact so that decisions made in one agency remain defensible in another.

In financial services, regulatory survivability dominates. Transaction records, advice documentation and compliance artefacts must maintain evidential integrity across system change. A migration that strips metadata indicating legal holds or advice lineage may appear technically successful while creating immediate regulatory exposure.

In health, migration risk extends beyond compliance into clinical safety. Patient records are not static artefacts; they inform future care. A pathology result without the clinical context of why it was ordered is not just incomplete - it is potentially dangerous. Migration decisions therefore become clinical governance decisions.

Legal practice brings different sensitivities. Matter files embed privilege, chain of custody and professional responsibility. A migration that intermingles privileged and non-privileged records or breaks internal matter structure, creates risk that no technical remediation can fully undo.

Architecture and engineering organisations operate on long liability horizons. Design calculations, approvals and as-built documentation form interdependent record sets that may need to be relied on decades later. Losing relationships between drawings and calculations does not merely degrade records - it creates professional and legal risk long after project completion.

At the heart of AS5393 is a simple question: what makes a record authoritative once it leaves the system in which it was created?

The standard distils this into four principles that every migration must meet:

• avoid loss
• appraise and sentence
• ensure provenance
• maintain links.

While these principles apply universally, their meaning shifts by sector.

Many migration failures arise not from negligence but from system design assumptions. Platforms optimise for storage, retrieval or performance, while organisations rely on relationships, context and narrative continuity.

The highest-risk migrations are rarely simple upgrades. They occur during integration and decommissioning - precisely the scenarios most organisations now face as they consolidate platforms, move to cloud services or exit unsupported systems.

AS5393 does not prescribe a single migration method. It provides a framework for judgement. Used well, it enables organisations to preserve not just records, but the authority those records must continue to carry when systems - inevitably - change.

About the Standard

AS5393:2025 was developed by Standards Australia Committee IT-021 Working Group 15, with representation from government archives, universities, professional bodies and private sector organisations across Australia. It is the first international standard to specifically address records migration methodology and technical specifications, providing a structured framework for managing the risks associated with migrating authoritative data, information and records between systems.

Link to Standards Australia:  https://store.standards.org.au/product/as-5393-2025