How to Plan Your ITSM Data Migration to ServiceNow?

Dima Lazarchuk · ‎08-30-2022

Powering your support team with help desk software is a great idea. Sixty percent of high-growth customer service teams use a help desk platform, like ServiceNow. If you want to know how to migrate help desk data to ServiceNow, read on.

Top ways to run your ITSM data migration

Whether you are looking to migrate your ITSM data to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) application ServiceNow or to a service desk solution you’ve built on Now Platform, you can choose to do your data transfer in one of two ways. Let’s take a closer look at each of them.

Hire a data migration vendor

An outsourcing agency can help you painlessly transfer your service desk data to ServiceNow and can help with maintenance and support of the new platform as well.

The main benefit of hiring an agency is that you can hand over the task to developers with extensive expertise. Meanwhile, you and your team can focus on other aspects of growing your business. The main disadvantage of outsourcing migration is that it can require a large cost investment. Another drawback is that you let business outsiders handle your company and customer data. Check the vendor carefully and have them sign an NDA to protect your information.

Automate your data migration

The other option is to use an automated migration service to conduct an ITSM data import on your own, which you can do even if you have no technical background. Help Desk Migration is one such automation tool. It has Migration Wizard that will help you implement data transfer quickly and easily. This way, you won’t need to hire data migration experts.

The service allows you to securely migrate your data with no or minimal downtime. It works with different migration scenarios, allowing you to implement ServiceNow migration from your existing help desk platform, CSV database, or shared inbox. Still, Help Desk Migration doesn’t cover all platforms, data formats, and structures: sometimes custom record import is needed, which is a bit more expensive than the fully automated version.

Here’s how Help Desk Migration works.

Prepare your data

Before the data migration starts, you need to prepare your data so that the migration runs smoothly. To avoid problems during and after the process, complete the following preparation tasks.

Alert your team. It’s best to give a heads up to your entire company before the change so that everyone is aware and anyone impacted by the migration can ask questions and make the necessary preparations.
Adjust your API limit. Before the migration starts, check your source and destination platforms whether the limits are enough. If not, increase your API limit for the time of migration.
Configure agent profiles in the target system. You must create help desk agent profiles unless you want all records assigned to the default agent.
Pause your current help desk. Make sure not to accept any new tickets during the migration process.
Document your business rules, macros, and automation. You’ll find this helpful when it’s time to set up automation rules on ServiceNow.
Select the best time to carry out the migration. Choose a time when you expect the help desk load to be at its lowest.

It sounds like a lot of preparation, right? The good news is that after completing these steps, you can start the automated migration and sit back and relax while it runs.

During data migration

Let’s start by addressing one thing you should never do. You might be surprised that an innocent clean-up during migration can lead to irreversible changes and ruin the whole migration process. So if you need to make any changes to the help desk, do so before the migration starts.

And here is what you should do during data migration: let it run. You’ll get a notification when the transition is finished; before that, there’s nothing else for you to do.

After data migration finishes

Once the migration is complete, you first want to check the outcome. Make sure that all the records reached their new destination properly. And then do the following:

Update your support team. Tell your team and the rest of your company that the new help desk is up and running.
Check your knowledge base. Once the migration finishes, links to your old knowledge base won’t be available. You’ll need to run an audit for all of your knowledge base entries.
Set up the new help desk. Turn all the support channels to the new help desk. Then set up the automation rules and triggers for your new tool. This should be easy because you documented them during migration prep.

Summary

You can complete data migration from another solution to ServiceNow in different ways: you can outsource a development team or use an automated migration service. Whichever path you choose, you need to properly prepare your data before the transition starts and not interfere with it once it’s in progress. When the migration finishes, you need to check your data to ensure everything went well and set up the new help desk, its automation rules, and its settings.