Organizations rely heavily on ServiceNow for their IT operations and software delivery activities. But on its own, a single tool is never enough. ServiceNow integration is a must-have for many of today’s enterprises to integrate tightly with the rest of the software delivery toolchain and to eliminate the manual overhead that may be slowing down cross-functional collaboration and business value delivery.
As the leader in value stream integration, Tasktop helps leading enterprises connect their toolchains –including nearly 50 % of the Fortune 100. In this article, we’ll talk about the most common integration use case for ServiceNow and explain how Tasktop helps organizations get it up and running fast.
Expediting Production Problem Resolution through Integration
One of the primary use cases for ServiceNow is the support desk module, which is used to report, track and resolve customer problems using your software. And often, the resolution requires a software fix from the developers.
If you’re part of the support desk team or a developer, you have surely experienced the frustration of wasting too much time duplicating information from ServiceNow tickets into other tools where developers actually do the work, like Jira, Azure DevOps, Rally and VersionOne.
Teams waste tremendous amounts of time “swivel-chairing” between systems, trying to keep records up-to-date in two places and sending emails and chat messages to follow up on details and statuses. And since records in different tools are maintained manually, they’re more prone to error.
The fact that teams use different systems of record and different workflows makes collaboration and communication between IT support staff and developers particularly challenging, and often results in longer resolution times.
But that can all be solved through integration, which is why connecting ServiceNow and the developers’ Agile planning tools is by far the most popular integration use case Tasktop sees.
Ce integration pattern eliminates the time-wasting copy/paste work while also creating a completely visible and traceable defect reporting and resolution process.
Thanks to bi-directional data synchronization, information flows automatically to each practitioner’s tool of choice, bringing the work to the people (instead of the people to the work) and creating a single source of truth.
How Does Tasktop Work with ServiceNow?
Tasktop uses model-based integration to seamlessly flow the data you need for collaboration from tool-to-tool, in near-real-time. Model-based integration is 4x faster to set up and 10x easier to maintain than any other integration solution (more on that later). The data flowing across tools in this use case includes the ServiceNow fields, statuses, comments and attachments on your Problem, Incident and Defect artifacts.
Teams can easily exchange comments directly from within their tool of choice, thereby maximizing productivity for support engineers and developers and creating a traceable thread of communication.
Tasktop helps teams collaborate seamlessly, never having to leave their tool of choice or copy and paste information. There are several unique advantages to using Tasktop’s intuitive, point-and-click, no-code solution:
- Avoid plugin pandemonium: Many tools may offer inexpensive plugins for ServiceNow, but these plugins lack the scale that software delivery organizations with thousands of employees need. With very narrow functionality, no granular control over behavior and proliferated point-to-point integration between tools, inexpensive plugins are unsuited for large organizations. Tasktop provides a scalable integration infrastructure for Enterprise IT, providing admins with full control over workflow, field updates, field display, and data transformation.
- Reliable version support: Your toolchain is constantly being updated as vendors release new software updates and APIs, meaning your tools can lose compatibility with one another quickly. Not only does this cause data discrepancies and require teams to revert to manual synchronization until the problem gets resolved, but it can even cause a complete integration outage. Tasktop’s Integration Factory runs over half a million tests every night on over 300 tool versions to ensure your integrations will continue to work even as you upgrade to the latest and greatest version.
- Making sense of your data: With so much variability in the way teams capture, organize and manage their work in multiple systems of record, it can be exceedingly hard to create meaningful metrics without a lot of manual data manipulation. Taskop’s model-based integration standardizes the information exchanged by integrations, normalizing the data in real-time as it flows across repositories. It can also store the normalized data into a reporting database, making it possible to generate reports and metrics across tools easily.
- No Coding Required: There’s a big difference between “low code” and “no code”. It can be tempting to try to build your own integration solution using ServiceNow’s pre-built connectors and a workflow orchestrator. But this doesn’t come without problems. You still need to design and code the business logic and workflow, which will require significant developer resources to program, test and maintain (in an ever-changing environment). Onboarding is also typically slow because what you build must take into account each team’s own implementation of tool, process, and workflow. And because you can only address projects one at a time, large scale adoption can take years. Tasktop’s out-of-the-box, point-and-click configuration gives enterprises rapid time-to-value and allows you to roll out the integrations at scale, while accommodating each project and product’s needs.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this blog, where we talk about 6 more integration use cases between ServiceNow and the rest of the toolchain.
En savoir plus
Tasktop supports ServiceNow Service Desk, Agile Development (previously SDLC), and PPM modules, to help you flow the right information from your ServiceNow toolset to other tools used in the software delivery process. Tasktop can integrate ServiceNow with 59 best-of-breed tools in the software delivery toolchain, from ideation to operation.
To learn more about how Tasktop can help you integrate ServiceNow, we invite you to schedule a personalized demo with our team.
