Migrating BMC-Based ITSM with 20 Integrations to ServiceNow® Platform

About Our Client

The Client is an IT company focused on providing software development and IT services, with 10,000+ employees and a turnover exceeding $1 billion.

Challenge

The IT company’s BMC-based ITSM system was integrated with their customers’ ITSM solutions so as to enhance the quality of Service Desk support. This way, the IT company’s customers could use their in-house ITSM solutions to track the incidents and requests outsourced for processing.

Once the IT company decided to migrate to the ServiceNow® platform, the challenge was to preserve existing integration workflows within the new ITSM system.

Initially, there were around 20 integrations to migrate. Yet, anticipating similar integrations in the future, the IT company wanted a scalable solution that would make next integrations quick and easy. In addition, the solution had to comply with the strict internal security rules.

Solution

ScienceSoft’s team’s experience with ITIL processes and both ITSM platforms (BMC and ServiceNow) allowed them to elaborate the concept of the integration solution in line with the IT company’s specific requirements. At the first stage, our ITSM experts came up with an integration roadmap and standardized documentation needed for every integration. This included templates for integration workflows, data mapping, and test cases, which were used to formalize customers’ integration requirements at the pre-development stage.

As the IT company’s policy restricted direct access to their ServiceNow system, the delivered solution involved an intermediary in the integration chain, the Integration Broker. Since the Integration Broker was a third-party web service, ScienceSoft’s team had to establish the connection between the IT company’s ServiceNow system and the Integration Broker.

Integration process

Utilizing the ServiceNow platform’s functionality, ScienceSoft delivered an integration application and incorporated it into the IT company’s ServiceNow ITSM system. In each instance, the two-way integration process takes the following steps:

• The integration application retrieves data on an incident / request from the IT company’s ServiceNow system and sends it to the Integration Broker.
• The Integration Broker transforms these data in accordance with the integration rules and sends it to the customer’s ITSM system in an acceptable format.

Following a similar workflow, data is transmitted from the customers’ ITSM solutions to the IT company’s ServiceNow system. This way, the application allows the IT company’s customers to use their own ITSM solutions to track the incidents and requests processed via Service Desk support.

ServiceNow integration application

The ServiceNow-based integration application includes an integration logic and 3 configurable components that can be tailored to each of the IT company’s customers: integration parameters, configuration details, and business logic.

Integration logic describes the overall integration workflow, that is how the system should work to push and pull messages between the ITSM systems. Integration parameters contain integration rules defining which tickets and how to transmit. Configuration details include general information about a customer and the Integration Broker. And business logic contains a customer’s specific requirements for data mapping.

Additionally, ScienceSoft incorporated integration logging into the app to keep the history of data transactions between the IT company’s ServiceNow system and customers’ ITSM solutions.

To ensure the consistency of data transactions and a fast service recovery in case of a system fault, our team implemented the status monitoring feature, including email notifications about failed transactions, automatic daily reporting, and the option of automatic / manual resending of the missed data.

Results

The project resulted in migrating 20 integrations with the IT company’s customers’ ITSM solutions to the new ServiceNow-based system. In addition to providing Service Desk support, the IT company can now offer integration with the customers’ ITSM systems as an extra service through the reusable integration application delivered as part of the project.

The established workflows and the delivered functionality can be used for future integrations, which leads to reduced integration costs and a decreased integration delivery time (around 2-3 months). For now, around 50 integrations have been performed via the delivered solution.

Technologies and Tools

ServiceNow