Updating Inactive Records Due to Incorrect Categorisation

[Community Alums]

As a ServiceNow Development and Support team we have been asked to update hundreds of inactive records, to change the categories and subcategories that have been assigned when the record was resolved and closed.

In the 11 years of developing the platform my advice has previously been that this is not best practice and should be avoided.

What are others opinions or guidance? Would be great to have input from other ServiceNow experts.

[Sandeep Rajput]

@Community Alums As you rightly said, it is not recommend to update a record once it is resolved and closed.

May I know why it was requested to change the categories and subcategories after the record was resolved?

Did business have any solid reasoning behind it? If it is absolutely necessary then may be a work note can be added on the same record explaining why the changes were made. This way if some audit happens in the future on such records then the auditor would know why the change was made in the first place after the record was resolved.

[Community Alums]

@Sandeep Rajput of course, so they have asked for new subcategories to be created to better categorise issues for a particular business service, therefore they want to retrospectively update existing records with these new subcategories, for reporting purposes.

[Mark Manders]

Then this makes no sense. At the moment of incident resolving, they were good and now they need to be categorized as something else. That's something I would challenge. 

It's the same as having an SLA that changes from 10 to 8 hours. You are not updating the already closed records, because of that change (unless it was wrongly configured). It will run on the records created after the change. 

Since it is new subcategories, just don't do it. If it was wrongly categorized, it's a different thing, but allowing this, will get your team to do all kinds of 'after' work starting now.