ServiceNow Integration Use Cases that Improve Operations, Alignment and More

To get the most value out of ServiceNow, a number of ServiceNow integration use cases should be pursued to encourage greater alignment between IT and the rest of the organization.

Such ServiceNow integrations are essential in optimizing processes, improve employee productivity, and deliver maximum value to customers.

This blog highlights the top 5 ServiceNow integration use cases that improve operations, alignment and more.

Top 5 ServiceNow Integration Use Cases

1. ServiceNow to Reporting, Analytics and BI tools

While ServiceNow has some reporting capabilities, many organizations find them limited:

• Users can only analyze data within the Now Platform. They cannot combine ServiceNow data with other sources for reporting and analysis, which prevents the organization from getting a complete view of its business data.
• The default reporting feature does not easily handle data-heavy reports. Running reports/analytics on large volumes of data can cause system overload, leading to slow queries and instances. Performance degradation delays reports and impacts other features of the Platform.
• ServiceNow reporting does not support historical trend analysis – users can only analyze the current state of instance data. Tracking historical metrics demands extensive manual input.

Due to these limitations, organizations choose to integrate ServiceNow with dedicated reporting, analytics and business intelligence tools like Tableau or Power BI to perform advanced reporting and analysis.

• See also: ServiceNow Reporting vs. Power BI

By integrating ServiceNow with reporting, analytics and BI solutions, organizations can make better use of the available data benefiting from advanced data models, complex reports, and greater range of data visualization options.

This, as well as combing ServiceNow data with other data sources helps business leaders gain 360-degree visibility into internal operations, and teams around the organization make better use of enterprise data.

• See also: ServiceNow Reporting Explained: Benefits, Limitations and Alternatives

2. ServiceNow-to-ServiceNow

An obvious ServiceNow integration use case that benefits enterprises with or interacting with multiple ServiceNow instances, is a ServiceNow-to-ServiceNow integration.

This is a common scenario in many managed service providers who want to directly integrate their ServiceNow instance with a customer organization. It is also a scenario that occurs within large enterprises with disparate teams, and/or those that have acquired organizations that also use ServiceNow.

A ServiceNow-to-ServiceNow integration allows an organization to synchronize (eBond) multiple ServiceNow instances to ensure they are all kept up to date.

Consider this scenario: The customer support team handles incidents and client requests, documenting them in ServiceNow while also monitoring related customer interactions. Meanwhile, Quality Control focuses on product issues within a separate system.

Both teams may require access to certain data from the other team. With a ServiceNow-to-ServiceNow integration, relevant data can be exchanged seamlessly and in real-time, such as comments, important updates, and the status of tasks.

3. ServiceNow to Third-Party ITSM Solutions

While ServiceNow offers a well-featured ITSM solution, there are many cases where organizations have multiple ITSM solutions that they need to manage.

To avoid redundant work and systems inevitably reflecting out-of-date views of the enterprise and the status of tasks, organziations can eBond ServiceNow with different ITSM solutions.

eBonding facilitates bidirectional synchronization, meaning modifications in one system reflect in the connected system in real-time and vice versa. By synchronizing multiple systems, eBonding enables inter-application workflows that improve employee experience, data quality, and process automation.

Automated workflows eliminate manual data entry and the cumbersome task of managing multiple applications, resulting in greater confidence in the accuracy and accessibility of synchronized data.

Integrating ServiceNow with third-party ITSM tools can connect processes among multiple systems/applications.

While the integrated service management structure helps minimize IT costs and complexity. Automatic data exchange across systems helps an organization deliver quality and consistent services faster, creating better customer experiences.

4. ServiceNow to Data Lake / Data Warehouse

Organizations using ServiceNow often find that it is a data silo that is difficult to extract data from.

For this reason many organizations integrate ServiceNow with centralized storage solutions such as data lakes and data warehouses.

ServiceNow to data lake/data warehouse integrations break down the ServiceNow data silo, allowing organizations to improve data availability and combine data from disparate sources.

This creates a single source of truth supporting various operations, including BI, analytics & reporting, AI, ML, data archiving, and backup & disaster recovery. 

Different teams can access and use the data to perform cross-functional analyses quickly and accurately. 

Data lakes and warehouses often serve teams across an organization, and so they ingest massive amounts of data. As such, populating them requires a high-throughput integration solution that can achieve real-time, dynamic data transfers that helps reflect an up-to-date picture of the enterprise.

While choosing the integration solution, organizations must consider data quality – and data transformation in particular where data warehouses are concerned – to ensure the data ingested is useful.

Teams reliant on data from a centralized repository need to trust the accuracy of the data to use it and to make meaningful decisions with confidence.

Since warehouses require data to fit a particular schema, the chosen integration solution should support data transformation capabilities.

• See also: Integrating ServiceNow with a Data Lake or Data Warehouse

5. ServiceNow to AI/ML

AI and machine learning are quickly revolutionizing how organizations operate, with IT service management being an early application of the technology. 

A few notable applications include:

• AI-powered incident management for automatically classifying incidents
• Machine learning enabled chatbots and knowledge repositories that use historical data to improve recommendations
• AI-enabled service quality monitoring that identifies issues before they become critical

The application of AI/ML in ITSM is only set to expand in coming years, with research indicating that the AIOps market is “expected to grow from $2.83 billion in 2021 to $19.93 billion by 2028.”

Regardless of the application, both AI and ML require vast volumes of data to work effectively, with ServiceNow’s wealth of rich information and insight being a valuable source. 

Due to the volumes of data required, organizations planning to integrate ServiceNow with AI or ML solutions should choose the integration method carefully.

High throughput and a minimal impact on ServiceNow performance are essential considerations, as is data quality, to ensure that the data powering AI and ML solutions can be used to address business challenges. 

Take Advantage of ServiceNow Integration Use Cases with Perspectium’s Integrations-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Solution

Created by ServiceNow’s founding developer, David Loo, Perspectium is a one-stop IaaS solution that servees a range of ServiceNow integration use cases.

Perspectium provides natively installed, purpose-built applications for integrating and managing ServiceNow data.

With Perspectium, organizations can take advantage of various ServiceNow integration use cases – from connecting ServiceNow to BI and reporting tools, to synchronizing multiple ServiceNow instances and ITSM solutions.

DataSync

Through its DataSync solution, Perspectium allows users to replicate and transfer huge volumes of ServiceNow data – either dynamically or as batch transfers – to their various repositories and systems without impacting ServiceNow’s performance.

Unlike many modern API-based integration solutions, DataSync uses its native installation within ServiceNow to transfer data via more efficient and less resource-intensive push technology.

Data is pushed out of ServiceNow and into a secure, cloud-enabled message broker system (MBS), where it is retrieved by target systems.

This ensures fast data transfers and means ServiceNow isn’t burdened by excessive external API calls that degrade performance.

Thanks to this approach, DataSync can help transfer and replicate over a billion records per month.

ServiceBond

Through ServiceBond, Perspectium also supports eBonding integrations, allowing organizations to synchronize ServiceNow with another ServiceNow instance or ITSM solution.

As with DataSync, ServiceBond utilizes Perspectium’s MBS, enabling fast data transfers with no impact to ServiceNow’s performance allowing for data to be synchronized in real-time.

Want to learn more about integrating ServiceNow with Perspectium? Contact us.