How to Simplify Your Enterprise Architecture by Integrating ServiceNow

By integrating ServiceNow with the wider enterprise, organizations can remove data silos and enable inter-application workflows to simplify their enterprise architectures.

Particularly in the case of large enterprises, data silos adversely affect the customer and employee experience. An organization’s employees struggle to get the right data, at the right time, in order to do their jobs effectively. An organization’s customers suffer because delays within the organization impact the time to resolution of open cases.

Enterprise data integration – Why do you need it?

Data integration helps improve the availability of data within an organization, and improves data quality. It does this by breaking down the silos that keep data and data systems disconnected from the wider organization.

Without integrating data and data systems, complex enterprise architectures can lead to poor data quality. Data silos make synchronizing systems across departments difficult, and so data in one system is more likely to be out-of-date and/or misleading.

Data silos also prevent an organization understanding and interpreting data in context. This further limits data quality and the insight to be gained from the data itself.

A report by Gartner reveals that every year, poor data quality costs organizations an average of $12.9 million. Naturally, improving data quality and alignment of data systems is critical to an organization’s bottom line.

Data integration allows enterprises access to the right data when they most need it.

Data integration focuses on delivering the right data through the pipeline. It aims to facilitate and streamline voluminous data movement from the source system to the target. The goal is to move and/or synchronize data securely, easily and efficiently to support the businesses.

Unsilo data – Move the right data to the right place at the right time.

Modern companies function with complex requirements in dynamic environments. As business automation (including IT processes) has become the ultimate need for growth and scale, connecting cross-functional business applications is vital.

In a ServiceNow integration strategy (or your chosen ITSM tool) interconnected enterprise apps sharing data, must convert data into suitable formats as it moves through an enterprise’s systems. Data integration enables this either dynamically in real-time or via batch updates.

The integration must account for inconsistencies in how data is stored in the target and source systems, and operate rules in order to apply the correct formatting.

All necessary touch points within an ecosystem must be able to harness the data in the required format as and when needed.

This seems straightforward in practice, but organizations that opt to build their own integrations often suffer unwanted results from missing data to outright integration failures.

However, by working with an integration as a service provider, organizations can avoid this predicament.

How Integrating ServiceNow benefits your enterprise architecture:

• Harness the power of real data

It is challenging to access, customize, and test business data for multiple instances. Thus, businesses usually integrate all instances (even sandbox instances) with a service management tool for smooth testing and development. You can minimize rollout errors by syncing your production data into sub-production instances while ensuring optimal data throughput.

For instance, if you synchronize a service desk’s production instance to a development instance, any change in the production level will also reflect in the development instance. The uniformity in both environments allows developers to design new service desk solutions without worrying about data disparity.

• Share foundation data smoothly

Developers sometimes deal with implementations that need a database or sub-production instance as a data staging instance for external integrations. Doing this helps clean and transform the data into the desired shape before pushing it to production. It’s possible to process the data while maintaining its integrity to the same unique identifier value on the staging and production instances.

• Sync data with BI tools for enhanced reporting

You can quickly export and organize operational data to a database. Also, you can turn on dynamic sharing to save real-time changes in a database and query them using data analytics and reporting tools. By integrating service-desk data with BI tools and replicating service-desk to a reporting database, BI teams can create custom reports faster and expand their existing set of reporting solutions.

• Integrate with a big-data framework

You can integrate CRM or ITSM SaaS data from several production apps either dynamically or as batch updates into your big data or cloud environment. This will let you access crucial data in real-time, enhancing the decision-making process without affecting the production environment’s performance.

• Upgrade IT tools or migrate to a new tool

When you upgrade an IT tool or ITSM solution, you unleash a host of new features for better productivity and customer experience. However, upgrading is often challenging, especially when it involves multiple custom integrations such as data loss and inaccurate views. 

A data integration solution will ensure that your upgrade occurs seamlessly and with zero data loss during the transition. Even when migrating to a new tool, you can move only the desired data instead of resorting to an all-or-nothing approach.

Core Features of an Enterprise Data Integration Solution

An effective enterprise data integration solution makes it super easy for companies to access and move the right data, to the right place, and at the right time. When evaluating integration solutions, look out for the following key features:

• Data integrity – the integration should move data from one place to another without any loss. A good integration solution can work with various data schemas such as attachments, hierarchical tables, reference fields, etc.
• 100% control – You should be able to control your business data, deciding which data must be transferred across which applications and how. 
• High availability – The integration platform must allow you to retrieve data from multiple touchpoints after sharing it once. Plus, it must ensure zero to minimal downtime during power or network outages.
• High scalability – Your data integration solution must offer high scalability to help you reach optimal growth. It should move data smoothly without placing any limits on the data volume.
• Two-way synchronization – When you move data from one app/instance to another, the latter must be able to reciprocate. They should communicate bi-directionally so that any changes made in one reflect equally in the other, maintaining uniformity.
• Maximum security – Your integration should be secure and encrypt data for maximum security.
• High throughput – The data integration solution must be able to deal with colossal and complex data mounds with minimal impact on the app’s performance.
• Real-time sync – It’s not practical to schedule data exchanges for “off” hours as you’ll be working with outdated data. Rather, you should be able to sync data in real-time, ensuring complete certainty and avoiding costly mistakes.
• Easy implementation – Custom integrations managed in house are a huge drain on resources. Ideally, your integration solution should involve no coding or complicated implementation setup. It should be up and running immediately after implementation, featuring a familiar language and easy-to-follow tech ecosystem.
• Limited maintenance – You should not have to drain your resources in maintaining the integration solution. Instead, choose a complete package that’s fully supported and maintained by the solution provider.

The Solution: Perspectium Data Integration

Perspectium helps ServiceNow users move tens of millions of records a day without a noticeable impact on performance. Furthermore, Perspectium handles integrations as a fully now-case-study/managed service, so your employees can prioritize value-adding tasks.