Advantages of Unifying Versus Migrating Data in ServiceNow®

During your ServiceNow® journey you will probably encounter the “oh so fun task” of needing to migrate outside systems into your existing ServiceNow workflows. When faced with this project - and the time, risk, and cost of migrating data - you may find yourself thinking the easiest solution is to wait until a better option presents itself. Unfortunately, that better option rarely appears. Instead of taking on a major migration project, I am seeing clients find success by unifying outside data sources instead of migrating them. Unlike migration, unification allows you to maximize your ServiceNow investment by connecting to any data source and unifying that disparate data throughout the enterprise, rendering the information as needed within ServiceNow. Let’s look at some major advantages content unification holds over migration.

Implementations that are done in days, not months

The ability to bring outside sources into ServiceNow no longer needs to be a complex project that takes months or even years. By choosing to unify your sources instead of migrating, it becomes a straight-forward enhancement that can be done over your weekend change window. Why spend three months on a content migration when you can get the same results in a few days' time?

Unifying means no internal power struggles

One of the biggest issues I see with migrating data is about ownership. It’s common for groups to argue about what should be the system of record. Projects are often delayed or derailed not because of the technical requirements, time, or cost, but rather this disagreement over who owns the data. With unification, you're able to avoid these internal struggles. Instead you'll get more collaboration between groups who understand the importance of data insights across the organization.

Data relevancy

Regardless if it is CSM, ITSM, or HRSD, I constantly speak to clients who worry about presenting old or outdated information to the end users. By unifying data, the information is kept in one original place and any updates made in say, SharePoint, are reflected in ServiceNow.

Making digital transformations easier

We all understand the importance of ServiceNow within the enterprise transformation effort. Clients are finding that with the ability to easily access data from disparate systems, they can now provide more timely and relevant answers to questions, instead of just a list of results. With this capability clients are seeing measurable boosts in deflection rates as well as decreases in mean time to resolution (MTTR). Users don’t want to be logging into multiple systems to find answers, and with data unification, they don’t have too.

Data flexibility

Unification gives organization the ability to unify over 200 systems (like Box, SharePoint, Workday, CRMs, and more) and leverage information in over 700 file types in order to access knowledge wherever it resides. More often than not your typical migration may focus on just one system at a time. 

Data unification is simple with Elevate™

For far too long organizations have been struggling with the complexity, risk, cost and time of migrating various systems into ServiceNow. I'm here to say I understand these struggles and there is an easier way. Elevate for ServiceNow is a set of certified applications available for download in the SN store and immediately unifies your SN knowledge and external data sources. Elevate is a secure and simple solution that delivers value to all stages of the ITSM, CSM and HRSD workflows.

Contact us to learn how we can help you avoid that dreaded migration!