I'm currently working for a company with about 40,000 employees, and we're almost finished transitioning to ServiceNow for our service desk. This marks the third platform switch since I started back in 2015, moving from CA ServiceDesk to Cherwell Service Manager, and now to ServiceNow. With this transition, we're facing a challenge: we have thousands of Active Directory groups, firewall rules, and lots of documentation that relate back to the tickets created on the previous platforms. Unfortunately, most of the critical troubleshooting steps and lessons learned are only captured in those tickets. Once ServiceNow goes live, all those tickets will vanish, and I'm concerned about losing all that historical data. I'm wondering if this is a common issue in other workplaces or if there's a way to maintain long-term traceability. Could AI be a solution for this, or is there something I'm missing?
4 Answers
I’ve been through a ServiceNow migration before. The previous system had been in use for 15 years, and while it had some gems of wisdom, there were also a lot of irrelevant records. We kept the old system accessible in read-only mode for a year to let people reference past tickets. It was a little chaotic, but it helped with the transition!
It sounds like you're in a tough spot! I was wondering if the service platforms offer any built-in migration tools? You'd think that would be a big selling point, like "don’t lose your past data!" If they don’t, you might want to consider dumping the data into an SQL database or at least exporting it into CSV files. That might give you something to work with later on.
I can relate to your situation! We transitioned a few years back from ConnectWise to FreshService. Unfortunately, all our previous open tickets were forwarded to the new system, but we lost access to the older tickets entirely. We did manage a CSV dump, but it lacked the notes, so it was nearly useless. Over two years, I haven't needed to look back at those old tickets, but it depends on your industry and whether you have to keep records for a certain time. If you do need to maintain access, there are companies that specialize in ticket migration, but it can be pricey.
Looks like we're fine with losing records, since we only keep emails for a year, ha!
Just dropping this in here; during my last experience with ServiceNow, it was humorously nicknamed "ServiceLater" for pretty good reasons!
That’s a good point! But sometimes, migrations are outside the project’s scope or just too costly. It can be frustrating!