Moving from ServiceNow to Jira Service Management: Why and How?

Why are businesses switching from ServiceNow to Atlassian’s Jira Service Management for Enterprise Service Management (ESM), and how can you make the switch yourself?

While ServiceNow is a powerful tool for ESM, there are several reasons why organizations are finding that Jira Service Management (JSM) is a better fit for their organization.

Depending on your organization’s needs, JSM can cost only a fraction of what ServiceNow does. JSM offers many of the same features with an intuitive, open, and codeless platform that lets teams jump in easily, and that developers are already familiar with through Jira, the leading developer ticket solution.

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Why Migrate from ServiceNow to JSM?

ServiceNow was built specifically for ITSM based on Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) methodology. That means it’s more rigid, with heavy change management and approval processes, which can impede collaboration and innovation.

Meanwhile, the adaptable JSM can support ITIL best practices out-of-the-box, but offers more flexibility for teams that don’t adhere to ITIL methodology. It’s easier to achieve a true DevOps collaboration between IT and development teams because JSM is based on Jira, which many organizations use for software development tickets.

ServiceNow, on the other hand, deals strictly with IT ticketing, so creating JSM’s out-of-the-box DevOps collaboration requires third-party integrations with services like GitHub or even Jira itself.

JSM allows for onboarding, off-boarding, and change requests for staff, and includes templates for facility, legal, and customer management used to initiate tickets.

As a strictly IT-based platform, ServiceNow again requires third-party system integrations to facilitate the HR features that JSM offers, and no templates for non-IT department tickets.

Finally, when it comes to pricing, JSM’s license fee costs $20 per agent, per month, with a Cloud subscription. On the other hand, ServiceNow’s license costs $100 per agent per month.

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How to Migrate from ServiceNow to JSM

JSM only takes about a month-and-a-half to launch and go live compared to ServiceNow’s five-plus months, according to the G2Crowd IT Service Management (ITSM) Tools Implementation Index. But if your organization is already operating in ServiceNow and wants to make the switch, migrating to JSM is a more complex operation.

You'll want to make sure you’re not losing any critical data when moving the data that you already have stored in ServiceNow. Unfortunately, there are no push-button migration tools that export all your information for such a switch.

Ensuring no data loss means undertaking manual mapping of your data architecture, which is a careful, time-consuming process that requires deep expertise of both ServiceNow and JSM’s data architecture, especially because organizations can’t shut down productivity while migrating between systems.

Here are the six steps to a successful ServiceNow to JSM migration:

1. Analysis: Analyzing the data, workflows and processes that need to be migrated to define the scope of the migration.
2. Design: Targeting the system setup, data mappings and extraction scripts to design the JSM deployment based on your organization’s needs.
3. Extraction: Extracting the data from ServiceNow and mapping it to the JSM configuration designed in Step 2.
4. Transform: Cleaning and transforming the data to ensure that everything that needed to be migrated has been correctly imported into JSM according to your data mappings.
5. Load: Any customization work required based on your JSM design to meet your organization’s needs.
6. Testing and Support: Validating your data, testing and reviewing the new system, and monitoring to ensure that everything is working as intended.

If your organization needs the deep expertise of ServiceNow and JSM to make a migration as quick and painless as possible, we can apply our 23 years of experience implementing ITSM solutions to advise, implement and manage your migration.