A Guide to IT Service Desk Integrations and ServiceNow

IT Service Desk integrations connect the employees and solutions involved in IT support to other relevant areas of the organization.

Integrating the IT service desk with the wider enterprise is becoming increasingly necessary as organizations evolve their multi-tier IT infrastructure with new solutions, applications, and systems.

Such sophisticated IT ecosystems demand integrated workflows that connect the various systems and applications seamlessly, to improve collaboration, operational transparency and data availability, as well as boost employee productivity.

As such, users of IT Service Desk and ITSM solutions such as ServiceNow often pursue IT Service Desk integrations to break down data silos.

• See also: ServiceNow Integration Use Cases that Improve Operations, Alignment and More

What is an IT Service Desk?

An IT Service Desk is a component of ITSM. While ITSM is a broad framework encompassing the entire scope of service delivery, IT Service Desks focus on managing and supporting specific technical issues or customer requests.

Leading ITSM platforms such as ServiceNow provide IT Service Desk solutions.

What is an IT Service Desk Integration?

An IT Service Desk integration is a technological solution for connecting service desks to the broader enterprise. They consolidate data and processes, enabling automated workflows across multiple systems and creating a unified service ecosystem.

With a unified service ecosystem, organizations create a single source of truth, reducing the potential for errors and delays in service delivery, and making it easier for relevant stakeholders to access the information and data they require to support users.

IT Service Desk integrations can be focussed around data integration (feeding IT Service Desk data into an external repository) and system integration (synchronizing multiple service desks, or a service desk with an external solution).

Examples Use Cases for IT Service Desk Integration

Data Integration

Using service desk data to improve operations.

For instance, the IT team identifies a trend – such as a spike in new priority 1 (P1) incidents – that may indicate a more widespread issue.

In this case, an IT Service Desk integration can help highlight events that correlate with the spike, such as new releases, particular hours of the day, weather events – a whole range of potential factors.

Using these insights, the organization can improve resource allocation and ensure optimal staffing levels and system resources are available to resolve priority issues. 

System Integration

Organizations can integrate and synchronize multiple service desks to optimize processes and improve the overall employee and customer experience.

Such integrations can synchronize multiple internal Service Desk/ITSM solutions, or in the case of service providers, create syncronizations between the service provider and customer organizations.

For example, the technical support team may collect and manage tickets regarding customer issues and queries via ServiceNow. However, the internal development team manages their projects using Jira.

An integration synchronizing ServiceNow and Jira can better align teams working in each system.

When developers need to resolve an issue that originated from a customer query in ServiceNow, this integration ensures tickets and the data and information supporting them flows between the teams and the relevant systems automatically.

Why ServiceNow Users Should Consider Service Desk Integrations

ServiceNow users that introduce IT Service Desk integrations can take advantage of the following benefits: 

• Centralized Support Services

IT Service Desk integrations help create streamlined workflows and consolidate the data and information within systems supporting service delivery. Organizations can enjoy a unified view of incidents, issues, tickets, etc., as well as an automated means of exchanging data between systems.

It allows support teams, admins, and managers to work within their preferred solution(s), reducing redundant and repeat tasks by ensuring updates are reflected throughout the service delivery ecosystem.

• Greater Operational Efficiency

IT Service Desk integrations reduce the time spent in organizing and responding to incidents. Consistent ITSM processes across systems lead to quicker response times, better CX, and reduced IT costs and complexity. 

• Improved Analysis and Reporting

A well integrated IT Service Desk improves an organizations ability to create meaningful reports and conduct comprehensive analysis.

By consolidating enterprise data in a central hub, employees can access real-time updates, generate reports and advanced visualizations reflecting combined data sources, and identify trends. As such, organizations are better equipped to preemptively identify and address issues.

• Improved User Experience

IT Service Desk integrations improve the user experience for both employees and customers. By making data more readily available to employees and reducing the need for redundant processes, employees can support customers more efficiently.

• Improved Self-service Access

Integrating IT Service Desk data with an external repository improves data availability around the enterprise, allowing organizations to promote secure, self-service access to data. By promoting self-service and improving data availability, organizations can experience greater operational efficiency and faster issue resolution.

• See also: How to Democratize ServiceNow Data and Enable Self-Service Access

Perspectium’s IT Service Desk Integrations for ServiceNow Users

Planning and implementing ServiceNow integrations requires careful consideration, as Service Desks are an integral component in ensuring a positive experience for customers and employees.

Key considerations include:

• the internal resources available to effectively implement, maintain and manage the integration.
• the performance and throughput of the integration and its effect on the performance of integrated solutions.
• the speed at which integrated data is delivered and made ready for use.

Perspectium is an data replication and integration solution, purpose-built for ServiceNow that effectively addresses all of these concerns and more.

Designed by ServiceNow’s founding developer, David Loo, Perspectium is installed natively within ServiceNow, and seamlessly integrates the platform with external repositories and other solutions supporting ITSM.

The solution was made with ServiceNow users’ needs in mind, such as high-throughput and real-time data transfers capable of moving over 20 million records per day.

Perspectium’s high-throughput is made possible by its push technology-enabled approach to integration.

Instead of performance degrading, external API calls, Perspectium uses its native installation within ServiceNow to push data out into a cloud-enabled message broker system (MBS) where the target system can then retrieve the data. This allows for greater throughput whilst minimizing the impact on ServiceNow.

The MBS also prevents data loss by preserving data in the event of system outages. Instead of being lost, transferred data waits securely in the queue until the target system is back online and the transfer resumes.

Users can manage their integrations from within the familiar ServiceNow UI, and implementation and maintenance is handled by Perspectium to allow organizations to make better use of internal resources.

With Perspectium, organizations facilitate the seamless flow of data across the organization, improving self-service access, data availability, and operational efficiency while preserving ServiceNow’s performance. 

Perspectium supports both data and system integration via its DataSync and ServiceBond applications respectively.

DataSync: ServiceNow-to-Data Repository Integration

Perspectium’s DataSync allows users to quickly populate external repositories in support of data lake/warehouse building, data migration, enterprise application integration, or centrally managing master data.

Organizations can replicate and transfer massive volumes of ServiceNow data for use in advanced analytics, performance reporting, BI, AI, ML, and more.

DataSync vastly improves data availability and promotes secure, self-service access to data, allowing employees without a ServiceNow license to enjoy secure, governed access to the platform’s data and insight.

ServiceBond: Service Desk to Service Desk or Service Desk to ITSM 

Perspectium’s ServiceBond is an eBonding integration solution that bidirectionally connects ServiceNow and its workflows to other IT Service Desks/ITSM solutions, all from within the Now Platform.

Leveraging Perspectium’s performance-impact free technology, ServiceBond is able to sychronize ServiceNow and connected solutions in real-time, improving operations and collaboration by maintaining an accurate, up-to-date service ecosystem.

Interested in Perspectium’s ServiceNow, IT Service Desk integrations ? Talk to our experts today!