Best Practices for Building a Classification Taxonomy Strategy When Migrating from a Legacy Platform

[Aebalo]

Hi ServiceNow Community,

I am the ServiceNow Platform Owner and Project Manager (dual role) for a large county government IT organization currently migrating from a legacy IT service management platform to ServiceNow. We are implementing IT Service Management, Configuration Management Database, and Service Catalog as part of our Phase 1 build, and I am responsible for both classification design and taxonomy strategy.

I am looking for guidance, best practices, and real-world experience from others who have gone through a similar journey. Specifically, I have four areas I am trying to work through:

1. Where do I start?

We have an existing classification structure from our legacy platform categories, subcategories, and service catalog items that have accumulated over years of use. Some of it is clean. A lot of it is not.

Should I start by auditing what we have, or should I design the target state first and then map legacy data to it? Is there a recommended sequencing or framework for approaching this?

2. What do I do with our existing classification and catalog data?

Our legacy catalog and classification structure was built organically over time without a governing framework. We have inconsistent naming, overlapping categories, and catalog items that do not align clearly to services or assignment groups.

How have others handled this? Do you bring the legacy data over and clean it up in ServiceNow, or do you use the migration as an opportunity to redesign from scratch? What are the risks of each approach?

3. How do I design a classification taxonomy that works for both Incident Management and the Service Catalog?

This is where I am struggling the most. I want the classification structure for incidents and requests to align with the Service Catalog taxonomy so they tell a consistent story but I am finding it difficult to design something that works cleanly for both.

Are there patterns or models others have used to align these two? How do you handle cases where a catalog item does not map neatly to an incident category?

4. How do I build and present the strategy to leadership?

Once I have a proposed taxonomy and classification approach, I need to bring it to executive leadership for alignment and approval. I want to present it in a way that is clear, defensible, and tied to business outcomes not just a technical taxonomy document.

Has anyone developed a framework, one-pager, or presentation approach that worked well for getting leadership buy-in on a classification strategy? What do executives typically push back on, and how did you address it?

Any templates, real-world examples, lessons learned, or pointers to ServiceNow documentation or Now Learning courses would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.