A Guide to ServiceNow IT Workflows

For users of ServiceNow, IT workflows help improve operational resilience and increase employee agility. ServiceNow offers a range of solutions to support organization’s IT workflows, including IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM).

ServiceNow also offers solutions to support other types of workflow, including Customer, Employee, and Creator Workflows.

What Is a Workflow?

A workflow refers to the sequence of processes required to complete a task. Typically, workflows are linear or cyclical. 

Linear workflows run through processes in a particular order of steps before they are complete. While cyclical workflows also follow a particular order, upon completing the last process, the workflow starts again from the first step. 

How Do ServiceNow IT Workflows Benefit Organizations?

Manual operations and disjointed tech stacks/systems create huge bottlenecks for organizations. Besides being time-consuming, they hinder daily operations leaving increased scope for errors – human and otherwise – that can add significant technical debt.

ServiceNow IT workflows reduce an organization’s reliance on manual processes, helping to streamline and optimize IT processes, reducing the scope for error. Teams can use workflows to automate interactions (e.g., requests, approvals, forms, scripts, etc.) and visualize the sequence of tasks via simple flowcharts, helping to ensure tasks are completed correctly and efficiently.

By ensuring processes are followed and executed consistently, ServiceNow IT workflows help maintain high standards of service, ensure data is readily available when required, and increase an organization’s scope to scale.

With ServiceNow workflows, creating a modernized IT service experience becomes easier. With ServiceNow IT Workflows, organizations can:

• Improve outcomes – Run automated digital operations securely to boost productivity, predict and mitigate potential issues, and deliver scalable solutions.

• Increase work efficiency – Besides integrating disconnected processes, it’s easy to eliminate redundant actions or tasks for increased employee productivity and efficiency.

• Adhere to compliance standards – Automation decreases the chance of errors significantly. Also, monitoring and auditing process performance helps adhere to compliance standards while improving service delivery quality.

• Boost the value of existing investments – Effectively manage assets across the enterprise through strategic planning, prioritizing, and monitoring operations. This ensures that all activities align with company goals while maximizing the value of existing investments. 

• Scale business – Eliminate bottlenecks that hinder transactional flows and implement process automation for enhanced operational resilience.

• Streamline security, risk, and cost management – Automated IT workflows help manage risk and resilience in real-time, reducing TCO (including hardware, software, and cloud costs).

How Integrations Improve ServiceNow IT Workflows

ServiceNow supports many critical business functions and is often connected to – and used by – multiple teams and departments. Similarly, employees supporting ITSM often work across many different solutions. 

While ServiceNow IT workflows allow processes to be automated within the platform, users will need integrations to extend this automation to external solutions.

• See also: ServiceNow Workflow Integrations

Fortunately, integrations can be introduced to ensure disparate systems stay in sync so that the whole enterprise can work from a single, up-to-date source of truth.

Perspectium is a trusted partner of ServiceNow, providing integration services and applications delivered natively through the Now platform. 

Perspectium’s integration services are fully-managed, meaning Perspectium’s integration experts handle everything from implementation to maintenance, freeing up internal resources for value-adding tasks.

With Perspectium ServiceBond, organizations can extend ServiceNow IT Workflows into complementary solutions via ebonding integrations. 

As a ServiceNow-native application, ServiceBond users benefit from a familiar interface and can monitor and manage their integration within the ServiceNow platform. 

Through ServiceBond, organizations can ebond multiple ServiceNow instances or ebond ServiceNow and a third-party application for secure and consistent data synchronization between them. Supported third-party solutions include BMC Remedy, Jira, and Zendesk.

With ServiceBond, ServiceNow users can:

• Extend ITSM Workflows into other apps, instances, and teams.
• Enable real-time connectivity with suppliers and vendors.
• Integrate ServiceNow with external service management apps.
• Employees can use their desired apps/tools to perform specific operations.

The Perspectium Pedigree: Performance Impact-Free ServiceNow Integrations, from ServiceNow Integration Experts

Perspectium was created by the founding developer of ServiceNow, David Loo, who used their intimate knowledge of ServiceNow to create an integration application and service free of the pitfalls of typical integration approaches. 

Perspectium differs from the web-services/API approach to integrations that require ServiceNow’s operational bandwidth to process – and so cause performance degradation at high data volumes. 

Instead of making API calls to ServiceNow, Perspectium operates natively within ServiceNow and uses Push Technology to send data to a cloud-enabled message broker system (MBS).

The MBS then replicates the data to the desired end-point without impacting ServiceNow’s performance. This allows Perspectium users to achieve massive throughput in data transfers. 

Perspectium also differs from the legacy, ETL-based approach to integrations. While many ETL solutions can achieve high throughput, limitations in terms of security make them inappropriate for many enterprise-scale organizations. 

In contrast, Perspectium provides multiple options for encryption, obfuscation, and capabilities to support auditing. These features help maintain the security of the ServiceNow platform and ensure the customer organization is compliant with privacy regulations.

If you’d like help with your ServiceNow integration plans, talk to us.