Migrating to ServiceNow – explained in four easy-to-follow steps

ServiceNow is one of the most popular ITSM tools in the market today and many enterprises are planning to switch to it. BMC Remedy to ServiceNow migration is something that a lot of companies are already doing, but the transition from Remedy to ServiceNow needs to be a well-thought-out process. At Softweb Solutions, we have been working with ServiceNow for a long time and have seen companies struggle with getting their data from some legacy ITSM tool to ServiceNow.
In this blog post, we will explain in a brief manner why you need to migrate to ServiceNow and how to do it (without getting too technical!).

Why you need to migrate from legacy ITSM tools to ServiceNow

Most companies do not want to migrate to a new ITSM tool or even upgrade to the latest version of their existing tool. The usual reasons given are the complex processes involved, business disruption caused due to a negative impact on daily operations and costs involved in purchasing a new system and customizing it and so on. After that comes the biggest hurdle – employee buy-in and training. If the new ITSM is too complex to use and the workflows have not been designed for the new system, the transition can end up a disaster.
On the upside, a smooth migration to ServiceNow helps organizations reduce their operating costs, eliminate complex and redundant processes and even the employees can manage their tasks more efficiently. There are tools that can help companies migrate from Remedy or any other ITSM system to ServiceNow while making sure that there is no impact to the daily operations, and retain historical data without loss of data.

How to migrate from BMC Remedy to ServiceNow

Before we go any further, there are certain misconceptions that need to be cleared out about ServiceNow. It is a powerful ITSM tool and is capable of much more but it does not work out-of-the-box. Your existing workflows probably will not work the way you expected in ServiceNow. This is because ServiceNow is a new system designed for the cloud. Most companies have workflows designed for legacy systems that run on-premises.

Once you have factored in all these challenges, the migration process itself can be divided broadly into these four steps.
1. Prepare:

• You need to document all the important components of your current ITSM tool or organization.
• You have to cover up the all dependencies with the help of team members and arrange a meeting with the coordinator of each component that you want to migrate.
• Another thing that you have to keep in mind is getting the credentials of both tools. For example, suppose you are migrating from BMC Remedy to ServiceNow. In this scenario, BMC Remedy is the source and ServiceNow is the destination. We need to integrate Remedy to ServiceNow in order to carry out the migration.

2. Discover

• In this step, all you have to do is check both tools with their components. If you are migrating users from Remedy to ServiceNow then ServiceNow must have all the fields ready to capture all the users’ details or information.

3. Implement

• In this implementation step, you will need to set up the path of source to destination. ServiceNow has a default feature that will take care of mapping for source and destination. All you need to do is set up the map of the file or data from source to destination.
• You can get the source from the very first step which has already been set up in the prepare documents step. Transform map is also a very useful feature of ServiceNow that can help you a lot in the migration process.

4. Operate and Transform

• After implementation you need to operate the functionality which has been implemented earlier for the migration process. The flow of execution will be handled by operating and transforming the process. You can migrate the components and data from one ITSM legacy to ServiceNow by the help of customization and that customization will do the transforming or migration of one system to another system.
•  You can also set up the scheduler to manage the data migration to ServiceNow whenever you want.

To know more on how to carry out a BMC Remedy to ServiceNow migration or from any other legacy ITSM tool, talk to our ServiceNow team.
Nihar Sharma is a technical analyst at Softweb Solutions. He specializes in ServiceNow and Salesforce CRM.