4 Common ServiceNow Integration Use Cases

There are a number of common ServiceNow integration use cases for helping organizations connect ServiceNow to 3rd-party applications.

The availability of ServiceNow integrations are key driving factors behind the ServiceNow’s popularity. 

As a leader in ITSM technologies, ServiceNow is critical to many organization’s operations. Integrating ServiceNow improves the employee and customer experience by breaking down data silos and enabling inter-application workflows and automation.

Why Integrate ITSM Solutions?

The success of data-driven approaches to business has increased the desire for data-driven insight and automation. However, as organizations become increasingly data-driven, they often leverage many disparate technologies from different providers.

The increasing complexity of their enterprise architectures means that much of the potential insight and automation opportunities can be lost to data silos. 

Without well-implemented integrations, such disparate technologies lead to data and information silos that prevent automation and holistic data-driven insight.

For smaller organizations, this dynamic can make it difficult to scale. For larger enterprises, this dynamic is chaotic, and costly to manage. 

By integrating key technologies, organizations can tap into data-driven insight and automation’s potential, allowing for greater scalability, easier data management and better quality.

IT Service Management solutions help facilitate and manage the design, planning and delivery of IT services. As both the customer and enterprise rely on IT services to communicate with and across the organization, ITSM solutions are a critical technology. 

Integrating ITSM solutions removes data and information,silos enabling end-to-end workflows and data synchronization between solutions.

Benefits of ITSM Integration

Integrating ITSM solutions benefits the enterprise, their employees and their customers in the following ways …

Benefits of ITSM Integration for Employees

ITSM integration benefits employees by:

• Increasing data availability so the information needed to work effectively is more readily accessible
• Limiting manual data entry and improving data quality by enabling greater automation
• Improving the on-boarding experience by making data available in one app, reducing the learning curve and minimizing the need for the “swivel chair” approach to managing various different technologies

Benefits of ITSM Integration for Customers

Greater integration of an enterprise’s ITSM technologies enhances the customer experience by:

• Reducing time-to-resolution by enabling cross-functional collaboration
• Providing greater visibility into case status by introducing end-to-end workflows between different technologies

Benefits of ITSM Integration for the Enterprise

By increasing the degree of ITSM integration, organizations can improve the experience of employees and customers. This leads to a positive feedback loop whereby:

• Employees find it easier to meet customers needs and lose less time to administration duties and poor data quality
• Customers enjoy greater standards of service and are more likely to engage in repeat business

4 Common ServiceNow Integration Use Cases

As one of the most popular ITSM solutions on the market, ServiceNow is a common target for implementing ITSM integrations. 

While the ServiceNow platform’s capabilities out-of-the-box are extensive, there are many reasons why organizations implement ServiceNow integrations.

ServiceNow integration use cases include the following:

ServiceNow to ServiceNow Integrations

One of the most common ServiceNow integration use cases is ServiceNow to ServiceNow. While you may assume such an integration is straightforward, ServiceNow’s high level of customization can make integrations complicated. Pre-integration, it’s unlikely that two instances of ServiceNow have entirely consistent data fields and labeling and categorization conventions.

Whether facilitating the merger of two entities with their own instances of ServiceNow, or connecting to a partnering, external service provider, ServiceNow to ServiceNow integrations need to be well-managed. 

ServiceNow to Jira Integrations

As one of the most widely-adopted platforms for managing development projects, Jira is a common integration option for ServiceNow users. Integrating the two platforms allows IT teams to collaborate more efficiently with both internal and external development teams. 

Users benefit from real-time synchronization and bi-directional workflows between platforms. When updating issues, the changes are reflected in the IT Ops incident record automatically. Resolved issues trigger change requests for IT Ops to manage the deployment. 

This drastically improves the processes associated with submitting, viewing and updating feature requests and bug fixes.

• See also: Integrating Jira and ServiceNow for improved awareness of business priorities.

ServiceNow to Salesforce Integrations

Considering both tool’s status as leaders in their respective markets, it’s no surprise that ServiceNow to Salesforce integrations are commonplace. 

Often involving large quantities of data, integrating ServiceNow and Salesforce improves collaboration between support roles and Sales. Client complaints can be handled more quickly and both roles are free to work within the tool they are accustomed to.

ServiceNow to Snowflake

Organizations choose ServiceNow and Snowflake for their speed, simplicity and performance in the cloud. 

It’s a common ServiceNow integration use case as organizations often extract and replicate massive volumes of ServiceNow data into Snowflake for analytics, BI, and data warehousing for greater insight. 

Integrating ServiceNow and Snowflake allows for this insight to happen in real-time, whilst maintaining security and scalability. 

Important Info for ServiceNow Integrations

Whatever the target, or the purpose of your ServiceNow integration project, organizations need to ensure they are well-prepared to facilitate the organization. 

ServiceNow is likely a critical solution to your enterprise, and any down-time or impacts to data quality will have a significant impact on your customers and employees. 

Organizations often consider custom-built, DIY approaches to ServiceNow integrations under the impression that they are “cheaper”. But the hidden costs of such an approach range from huge impacts to performance, to costly efforts to maintain the integration going forward.  

The recommended approach to facilitating ServiceNow integrations, is to use a native application. 

Perspectium is a native application for ServiceNow integrations that subverts many of the issues and hidden costs associated with custom-built integrations. 

Custom-built integrations leverage web-tools to enable integrations. This means they share limited bandwidth and add traffic to the same channels that their ServiceNow users operate within. 

This can severely impact query speed, particularly when working with large data volumes. Performance impacts can be severe enough to cause integration failures, which come with their own associated costs from financial to reputational. 

DIY integrations also add a burden on internal resources. Not only do integrations take a long time to build and implement – 39 percent of ServiceNow integrations take 100-500 hours – they also require maintenance and monitoring after implementation.

In contrast, Perspectium helps ServiceNow users move tens of millions of records a day without a noticeable impact to performance. Furthermore, Perspectium handles integrations as a fully managed service, so your employees have the capacity to prioritize value-adding tasks.

Need help with your ServiceNow integration project? Speak to us. 

If you’d like help estimating the total cost of ownership (TCO) of your integration project, try out our free Integration TCO Calculator.