5 Essential ServiceNow Integration Steps That Instantly Improve ITSM Performance

IT plays a pivotal role in driving business success in today’s digitally evolving landscape. However, many companies face challenges in managing a complex IT infrastructure and ensuring seamless service delivery. ServiceNow has become a powerful platform that streamlines processes, enhances efficiency, and empowers management to make data-driven decisions.

However, simply deploying ServiceNow doesn’t provide enough benefit from the services it provides. By integrating multiple other tools and applications to support IT Service Management (ITSM), ServiceNow maximizes the benefits of this platform. Having an understanding of the best practices for ServiceNow integration implementation helps organizations get the implementation right from the initial stages.

What can ServiceNow integrations do?

1. Connect gaps within teams, services, and applications to enhance data availability, support data integrity, and ensure reliable and consistent service delivery.
2. Offer automated interconnected workflows, providing users with streamlined automated tasks between applications.
3. Align disjointed tech stacks, eliminating the need for manual data entry, and providing real-time updates across applications.
4. Provide a single, consistent source of truth and a unified ITSM ecosystem.

Types of ServiceNow Integration

There are various types of integration available for ServiceNow users, including:

• Manual “swivel-chair” integrations – Manual extraction or transfer of data by employees from one system into another
• Custom-built – These services consist of new integrations built from the start, unlike pre-packaged solutions
• Platforms-as-a-Service – Implemented, managed, and maintained by internal resources, these are pre-packaged and ready to be integrated
• Integrations-as-a-Service – Integration experts deliver, maintain, and support a fully-managed service

Essential Integration Steps That Instantly Improve ITSM Performance

Businesses need to consider and examine numerous key elements before adopting and implementing ServiceNow to ensure a successful deployment that meets their business needs. The following best practices for ServiceNow integration implementation would help with smooth and fast implementation:

1. Leveraging managed services

Outsourcing integration, implementation, and maintenance of ServiceNow to trusted third parties can be beneficial for organizations. For large, data-driven organizations, integrations are crucial to operations and require a significant number of resources. Making it time-consuming, costly, and complicated. Interruptions during operations can cause significant delays and, hence, should be avoided where possible. Outsourcing to ServiceNow Integration Service providers offers consistent and constant support and maintenance, ensures the integration can be delivered efficiently by experts, and frees up internal resources for more strategic tasks.

2. Opting for native integration applications

A familiar user interface provided by the native integration applications is easy for employees to interact with, which benefits the organization by also facilitating the monitoring and management of the integration. Native integration applications leverage ServiceNow’s interface for no-code integrations, reducing the time consumed to understand the integration's use and cutting the associated costs. It also helps reduce errors because they are built from the initial stage to function with its host, requiring minimal configuration during implementation. Organizations can benefit from “push” technology-based integrations, as some native integration applications enable this, empowering organizations to achieve significantly higher throughput than API/web-service-based integrations.

3. Goal-oriented approach

Integrating and implementing ServiceNow helps organizations work towards and achieve set goals. The outcomes of integration should reflect and align with company goals, such as improving the employee and customer experience by making data more readily available. After integration of applications that align with company objectives, you can establish a plan that determines the method of integration. Lack of a goals-oriented approach to integration of applications leads to:

• Average or poor implementation
• Difficulty meeting the organization’s demands
• Technical disruptions and debt

4. Avoid manual intervention

Transferring data between systems can be implemented through integrating an efficient and consistent process. Manual processes not only hinder efficiency but also drain internal resources, being both time-consuming and prone to errors. Integrating an automated solution will help organizations transfer and organize data between systems in real-time, eliminating the need for manual intervention. Integration-as-a-service enables organizations to minimize manual intervention by employees, transferring these tasks to expert integration service providers.

5. Analyzing & understanding requirements

Aligning your requirements with the right integration is the recipe for success in the ITSM environment. Choosing an integration solution becomes manageable when these elements are considered: The amount or volume of data and the speed at which it is processed (throughput), i.e., real-time data transferring, processing, and replication.

Which Are The Essential ServiceNow Integrations for ITSM

Spreadsheets

Despite numerous tools integrated by organizations, spreadsheets still remain a crucial tool for many business processes. Used for reporting, project management, accounting, and more, spreadsheets are utilized by both IT departments and end-users. This means a seamless ServiceNow integration to and from spreadsheets is absolutely necessary.

Project management tools

Although your IT department rarely uses the project management tool for its daily work, other teams may frequently require it. Hence, keeping them up-to-date is essential, and one of the best ways to ensure that is with a ServiceNow integration that connects records to tasks in project management tools. This enables the team to have all the necessary information readily available where they conduct most of their work, ensuring every aspect of your ITSM processes runs smoothly.

Software development tools

Troubleshooting hardware or a stubborn operating system is not the only task ITSM consists of. But in many cases, creating and fixing custom software solutions for end users is also managed by IT specialists. This requires using the same kind of tools used by software developers. Integrating these tools with ServiceNow can help ITSM leaders track any software work that requires modifications, merging it with corresponding records in ServiceNow.

Knowledge bases

An incredible value resource is your IT department’s knowledge base. A ServiceNow integration with your knowledge base will help you centralize updates when dealing with new issues and can even close a ticket before involving IT specialists. By integrating ServiceNow with your knowledge base, your organization can make individual information available to end users as needed or update articles with data from ServiceNow tickets.

Other ticketing tools

Although your IT department might run on ServiceNow, your end users may still submit IT and other tickets through platforms like Zendesk or Intercom. This is especially necessary if they use these tools for customer support and want to maintain centralized control over their operations. This makes integration between these tools and ServiceNow absolutely essential.

Conclusion

The ServiceNow integrations enhance ITSM performance by enabling businesses to utilize their existing software, workflows, and investments without new programs, thereby saving costs, training, and the time-consuming process of data transfers. It is easier for companies to import data from their existing software into ServiceNow applications and export information to their current software. Maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of their IT operations with ServiceNow Implementation services, ensuring smooth integration and optimal use of their existing systems and resources.