When first faced with an enterprise data migration project some of the complexities can be well hidden, making the project appear quite straightforward - when this may be far from the truth.
For example, one would think that migrating from one instance of an IT service management (ITSM) application, such as ServiceNow, to a more up-to-date instance of the same application would be simple enough. But if the data structures have changed significantly between the old version and the new, or the old system has extensive customizations, a project team that hasn’t been made aware of the challenges might find itself stuck between the proverbial “rock and a hard place.”
The first reaction is often to look at building some in house scripts/code but as we explore below, this can lead to some unexpected challenges.
Potential Problems with Custom Migration Software
If your project team has access to development resources with the necessary skills to build migration scripts or custom programs, you are ahead of those that do not have that access…but not by much. Here are some of the issues that organizations often face when trying to develop custom software to support a system migration:
A significant and often underestimated amount of development effort is required to develop the custom software and migration scripts to deal with all the different data transformations.
Migrating attachments, embedded images and links, text formatting, and other more complex data types can be significantly more complex than anticipated, resulting in missing or incomplete data on the destination system.
This type of project requires development skills in general and specific domain knowledge in both the source and target systems. Not having this complete skill set leads to significant delays in migration projects while the developers get up to speed with the respective systems.
Migration projects are fraught with numerous traps to fall into, such as incorrect removal of leading zeros, maintaining correct record relationships, and many more.
The Bottom line is that custom development for migration projects can be an expensive and high-risk proposition.
Avoiding the Custom Software Trap
Imagine the convenience of having a ready-made tool that effortlessly simplifies the migration between any two ITSM instances, sparing your team from the need for custom coding—wouldn't seizing this opportunity be an irresistible choice, given the significant time, effort, and frustration it could save?
Such a tool does exist: the Precision Bridge Data Migration Automation tool. In the hands of a migration partner, this tool can greatly simplify the migration process because the mapping and transformation between ServiceNow instances have already been worked out.
Precision Bridge data migration automation can also help you reduce or eliminate the customizations in your source environment by mapping your custom data objects to appropriate out-of-the-box data structures in the target environment. It can handle data objects that are difficult to migrate by code, such as attachments, knowledge base articles, and workflows.
To find out more about how to avoid the data migration custom scripting/coding trap or to arrange a demonstration to explore the full suite of ITSM migration tools offered by Precision Bridge don't hesitate to get in touch.