ITSM Integration Benefits and Best Practices

IT Service Management (ITSM) integration helps organizations align disparate ITSM vendor services and applications.

In modern, data-driven business, aligning such services and applications is crucial, since many organizations leverage various vendors to serve their customer’s needs.

In order to provide a seamless and consistent standard of service, an organization’s ITSM applications must be connected. Such interconnectivity enables inter-application workflows, allowing data to transfer securely between apps.

Additionally, strong ITSM integration negates the need for manual data entry. Duplicate processes associated with keeping applications up to date can be avoided, by enabling real-time updates across services.

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Benefits of ITSM Integration
ITSM Integration Examples
Top Five Best Practices for ITSM Integration
The Best Tool for ITSM Integration

Benefits of ITSM Integration

ITSM integration helps streamline what would otherwise be a complex and disjointed technology stack. This provides value by enabling greater scope for automation, improved standards of service for the customer, less informational silos and more readily available data.

Here’s a breakdown of the key benefits of ITSM integration:

Increased Automation. By reducing the need for manual data entry, organizations save time and are able to expend their resources on more value-adding activities. This also mitigates the potential for human error and the associated financial and reputational costs.
A Single Source of Truth. Greater interconnectivity between critical applications helps foster consistency across the organization’s IT ecosystem. This ensures applications are synchronized, and the right data is readily available – not tied up in informational silos.
Consistent Services. By ensuring the right data is available when needed, organizations can greatly improve employee productivity. It also grants organizations greater confidence that service standards won’t be undermined by poor data quality.

IT Service Management Integration Examples

With the right strategy, service management integration can achieve the following:

Connect internal teams using different tools

Many modern organizations have more than one ITSM tool. While it’s not an ideal scenario, it is often necessary as different ITSM providers serve different needs.

Through integration, organizations can connect their various ITSM tools and ensure CI data, knowledge and more is synchronized between departments and systems, and flows securely, without friction.

Connect CRM and ITSM

Customer relationship management systems (CRM) and ITSM can be integrated to flow processes between CRM and ITSM systems. This allows organizations to better connect their customer service and IT services teams.

Cases can be passed between systems along with any attachments, journal fields and more.

Both systems can be synchronized to ensure consistency, and keep both teams in the loop.

Connect workflows and enable DevOps

Service management integration can ensure that work flows seamlessly between an organization’s ITSM and development systems, and maintain synchronization between the two.

This helps both the ITSM user and development user, by enabling them to operate within the systems they are most familiar with. The synchronization also reduces the need for work to be replicated.

Connect service providers to your workflows

With the right service management integration strategy, organizations can assign tickets to service providers using the same approach needed for their internal teams.

This ensures all relevant information is captured when creating and sharing tickets. It also provides the relevant departments with real time visibility into how the ticket is progressing.

Manage acquisitions and divestitures with confidence

Mergers, acquisitions and divestitures can be complicated and messy work. It’s extremely unlikely that any two merging entities will have perfectly aligned systems from the outset.

With the right approach to ITSM integration, organizations can help both entities synchronize ITSM data. Ideally the ITSM integration strategy should have the capabilities required to use business rules to determine which data should be stored in which system(s), to facilitate automation.

Top Five ITSM Integration Best Practices

There are five key best practices for ITSM integration that organizations should consider before implementing a strategy:

1. Use a managed service

The need for service management integration is born of the amount of outsourcing typical of modern organizations. Because of this, it might seem counter-intuitive to work with an integration partner.

However, the same reasons for outsourcing other IT services apply here too. Service management integration is a critical business function, enabling other critical business functions. As such, while it’s vital to implement and maintain, it can be resource consuming to do so.

Organizations should use a trusted service integration provider to get the job done.

See: “6 Hidden Costs of DIY ServiceNow Integrations”

2. Vendor consolidation

For the modern enterprise, vendor consolidation can save costs both directly – as there are fewer services to pay for – but indirectly also.

By reducing the amount of services from external vendors, organizations can spend less time on managing the disconnect between services, and more time on proactive, value driven operations.

Working with multiple integration tools and services can rack up costs and cause complications. Organizations should use a service integration solution and provider that can connect to a wide array of applications and cover all of their needs.

3. Use a native application for integration where available

Native applications integrate at the process level – where there is an understanding of the context of processes they execute. They allow for attachments, work notes and related records to be exchanged out of the box.

Additionally, updates to the ITSM solution may limit – or even break – the functionality of 3rd-party and DIY integration solutions. Where a native application for integration is available, organizations can be more confident in providing a consistent service.

4. Plan for scalability

Many, non-native integration solutions leverage web services to function. Often, these web services share bandwidth with the ITSM solution, meaning integrations have an impact on query speed.

Organizations should prioritize solutions that can scale up to tens of millions of data exchanges each day – without impacting performance.

5. Identify ITSM Expertise

Organizations should identify an integration partner focused on IT Service Management, with years of experience working with multiple vendors and technologies, and a deep understanding of service management processes.