By any measure, ServiceNow is among the most popular IT service management (ITSM) tools available today. Organizations worldwide have relied on ServiceNow to manage every aspect of their ITSM, from day-to-day helpdesk operations to problem management, change control, knowledge management, and more. Many organizations are long-time ServiceNow customers – some stretching back 10 years or more.
This allegiance can be a double-edged sword. A consistent and well-understood platform and interface makes life easier for the users, but older ServiceNow implementations are often heavily customized, making it difficult to move forward to newer ServiceNow versions. Often there comes a point where it makes sense to migrate to a new instance of ServiceNow on the newest release with the latest out of the box applications.
If your organization is contemplating such a migration, you have no shortage of things to consider. IT system migrations are never easy, even when migrating from one version to another on the same platform. You may fall short of your goals if you don’t look at the project from all angles (including the technical, business process, and user- and customer-experience aspects).
In this article we discuss, at a high level, the top technical considerations you must account for in a ServiceNow migration.
Technical Considerations
These top technical considerations can bite you if you aren’t careful:
The manual migration trap: A migration from one ServiceNow instance to another can make it tempting to perform the data migration manually–that is, by exporting data to spreadsheets, massaging the data to fit the import templates for the new instance, uploading the data, and getting a significant number of data errors. Correct the errors and try again. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s a most inefficient way to migrate data and can stretch your project timeline and costs to the breaking point.
The low-level development trap: As an alternative to manual migration, some organizations choose to develop custom scripts or applications to handle the migration. This approach can be just as problematic as manual migration. There are many considerations that are needed including validation, logging, handling errors, handling complex data types and transformations. Not only does the effort tend to be significantly underestimated but there is also a high risk that some data will be missed or migrated incorrectly which could be disastrous for the project. Also, there will need to be extensive testing and debugging using up valuable resources often for far more time than was planned.
The incomplete migration strategy trap: Your migration strategy should be planned with extreme care so that your shiny new ServiceNow instance has all the data and functionality you expect, with no gaps, bugs, or unforeseen issues. The issue here is that it can be tempting to leave data behind especially if trying to migrate without a specialist migration automation tool. However, this will significantly impact the business’s ability to capitalise on existing data including knowledge, asset, historical data, trend reporting and customer/employee service history.
A particularly important aspect of your migration strategy involves customizations. Catalog your existing ServiceNow customizations and determine which ones are supported out-of-the-box by the new instance, which ones no longer relate to your current business processes, and which ones must be replicated in the new instance.
Address These Considerations with Tool-Based Approaches
The good news for ServiceNow migrations is that tool-based solutions are available that eliminate the need for manual migration and low-level development and can even inform some of your migration planning. The Precision Bridge ServiceNow Data Migration Automation tool can analyze your existing environment and map it to the new instance, no manual migration or scripting is needed.
This approach streamlines not only the routine data migration tasks but also handles all types of data including audit history/journal entries, links, text formatting, embedded images and attachments and much more. The result is a more robust migration that meets your goals and timelines.
For more information on how migration tools from Precision Bridge can simplify your ServiceNow migration project, contact Precision Bridge today.