When someone tells me, “We just need to move the data,” I totally get what they mean. Nobody wants to lose ticket history, asset records, requesters, or that one weird-but-important workaround buried in a note from three years ago. Migrating ITSM data can be a huge win when it’s done right—your team keeps its context, adoption goes faster, reporting becomes more reliable, and the new platform starts off feeling familiar instead of empty.
In most cases, it goes smoothly. At Dataseti, 9 times out of 10 we migrate data on time and on budget, because we approach it like an engineering effort—not a “copy and paste” job. We do discovery first, map the data carefully, run test loads, validate results, reconcile totals, and plan cutover so there are no surprises at the finish line. The goal isn’t just moving rows from one system to another—it’s preserving trust in the data your team relies on every day.
But I’ve also seen migrations become the sneaky part of a project—the part that looks simple on paper and then quietly eats the timeline if you don’t respect what’s under the hood. ITSM tools don’t all store data the same way. A “status” in one system might not mean the same thing in another. The same goes for SLAs, categories, custom fields, ticket relationships (parent/child), and even the way notes and timestamps are recorded. If you don’t map it carefully, you can end up with missing context, broken history, or reporting that no longer matches reality.
Then there’s the big one: data quality. Most systems have a little clutter—duplicates, inconsistent naming, old categories that meant something to someone in 2019, or fields that were created “just for now” and never went away. Migration tends to expose all of it. Sometimes that cleanup is the best part of the project… and sometimes it’s the hardest, because it forces real decisions: what stays, what goes, what gets standardized, and who signs off.
We also have to be honest about the external factors that can impact duration and outcome—things no one can fully control. Vendor APIs can throttle. Export tools can have limits. Attachments can behave differently than expected. Identity mapping (agents vs. requesters, inactive users, SSO changes) can take longer than anyone wants. Stakeholder availability matters more than people think, too—when we need confirmation on mapping rules or edge cases, a few days of waiting can shift a cutover plan quickly.
A perfect example: we recently had a migration that should’ve taken a day, but API throttling stretched it into a full week. That wasn’t because the plan was wrong—it was because the upstream system limited throughput in a way that only shows up once you’re moving real volume. The good news is this is exactly why we build in validation checkpoints and communicate early when something changes.
And here’s the part I’m proud of: we stick by the original estimate. When external constraints like throttling hit, we don’t turn around and charge more just because the job got harder. We finish the work, we protect the outcome, and we do what we said we’d do—because the point is to get you safely into the new system with confidence, not surprise you with change orders after the fact.
If you’re planning a move between ITSM platforms, Dataseti can lead the migration end-to-end—and we’ll also tell you what can slow things down before it slows things down, so you can plan realistically, make the right calls on cleanup vs. speed, and land in your new platform with clean, trustworthy data.