Data enrichment and merging data

With BMC Helix Data Manager data enrichment, you can populate fields in the target system by looking up data from other BMC Helix ITSM forms or from a spreadsheet. This is useful if you want to apply business transformation, such as Product Catalog remapping, as part of the data migration.

Data enrichment is particularly useful to manage the merging of entities as part of an operating company consolidation. For example, as part of an operating company consolidation, some support groups are being migrated from the source system where there is no corresponding support group in the target system. However, where the logical support group already exists, any references to the original support group (in tickets, support group memberships, assignments rules, and so on) are remapped to the new values.

The following table shows an extract of the spreadsheet provided with the list of original support group names and IDs and the new mapped values. The consolidation migration adds an F prefix to the request IDs of all records migrated from the source system so that they do not clash.

Original Support Group Name	Original Support Group ID	New Support Group Name	New Support Group ID
Database Support	SGP000123	Database Support	SGPF00123
Application Support	SGP000226	Application Support	SGP054671
Email Support	SGP000229	Email Support	SGP009876
Help Desk	SGP004009	Customer Help Desk	SGP011972
IT Hardware Support	SGP007762	Hardware Support	SGP099001
Network Hardware Support	SGP009876	Hardware Support	SGP099001

The example above shows a range of mappings, including:

• Database Support group is being migrated from the source system. The support group name is not changed, but the support group ID lookup value shows the value after prefixing. This transformation would be automatically applied by BMC Helix Data Manager but is overridden with data enrichment, requiring a mapping for all source values.
• Application Support and Email Support are mapped to the existing support groups of the same name in the target system. The support group ID is not prefixed because this data is not being migrated from the source system.
• Help Desk group is mapped to an existing support group with a different name in the target system.
• IT Hardware Support and Network Hardware Support are being merged into the single existing Hardware Support Group in the target system.

Data enrichment provides a range of capabilities to address the remapping, merging, and migration of entities as part of an operating company consolidation.

Data enrichment can look up field mapping values based on the content of a source field. The BMC Helix ITSM fields used to underpin the ITSM multitenancy feature, such as Assignee group, may contain one or more group ids separated by semi colons. for example:

• ;1000000001;
• ;1000000028;
• ;1000000002;1000000001;

These group IDs typically need to be remapped or transformed as part of an operating company consolidation.

Data enrichment can look up the entire field value and remap it to an alternative value. Where a field value contains several concatenated group IDs, BMC Helix Data Manager will not perform a data enrichment lookup for each value, but for the whole string. For example, the Assignee group value of ;1000000002;1000000001; will not result in a lookup for 1000000002 and 1000000001 as two distinct group ID remapping lookups. Therefore, if data enrichment is used for Assignee group remapping, it is critical that the spreadsheet used for lookup contains all possible combinations of the Assignee group value used in your application. Typically, the number of group IDs on a ticket will not exceed three. SQL scripts applied after migration can be considered an alternative to data enrichment for Assignee group remapping. If the consolidation is combined with an upgrade from 7.6.04 or earlier to 8.1 or later versions of ITSM, the postmigration Assignee group script must be run and will rebuild the majority of Assignee group fields.