Customizations to your IT service management (ITSM) platform are fantastic—right up until they aren’t.
ITSM enhancements to platforms like ServiceNow® enable new functionality and boost efficiency, but the paradox is that the more efficient they are, the quicker you’ll grow beyond their capabilities. Companies with highly built-out and customized ServiceNow instances will find that later, they need to migrate to a greenfield instance.
A common mistake companies make with their ServiceNow® data migrations is to assume that the entire elephant can be eaten in one bite.
Companies set up ServiceNow instances, get excited about the wealth of customizations available to them, and build out their instances into complex beasts that seem to suit their needs but present challenges when migration time rolls around.
Any way you look at it, a transition from one major business system to another is a daunting task. Even migrating between different instances of the same application can present major challenges.
In this case, many organizations are surprised to learn that different application instances have different data models, which means that they can’t simply copy the database from one to the other. For some field mappings, transformations are required, and some of them can be quite complex, especially when dealing with attachments, journal entries or workflow.
In the old days, a couple of years ago, migrating data from one business application to another usually went like this:
A manual export from the source system to spreadsheets.
A tedious manual manipulation of the spreadsheet data in place, tedious manual copying and pasting from the export spreadsheets to import template spreadsheets, or both.
A manual import to the target system.
A fervent hope that nothing broke.
Repeating the process until it worked or the team gave up in exhaustion.
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