Executive Summary

ITSM integration connects IT service management systems with internal and external applications to create seamless user experiences, improve efficiency, and enable specialist teams to collaborate effectively across preferred tools. As IT ecosystems grow more complex with specialized functions, multi-vendor environments, and distributed service delivery, service integration has evolved from a technical afterthought into a strategic capability that determines organizational agility and service quality.

At ONEiO, we are fortunate enough to have a team of IT professionals who've worked in the ITSM space for many years. Being part of all the major trends and breakthroughs has led us to command a prominent position in the world of modern work. The introduction and fast-paced growth of service integration has been a game-changing development — one in which we have been able to create some exciting and highly-valuable solutions around.

This guide explains why service integration has become critical to modern ITSM, which processes benefit most, the most common integration patterns, and how modern integration automation platforms have transformed what was once slow, manual, and fragile into fast, reliable, and scalable.

What are ITSM Integrations?

ITSM integration connects IT service management systems with other internal and external applications to create seamless user experiences and improve efficiency. This is achieved through integration hubs, automation platforms, or APIs that enable data sharing, process automation, and improved workflows.

In practical terms, ITSM integrations enable:

Cross-tool collaboration: Development teams working in Jira receive service requests from IT teams working in ServiceNow without manual handoffs or context loss.

Multi-vendor coordination: When multiple service providers support an organization, integrated ITSM platforms ensure seamless information flow regardless of which vendor uses which tool.

Automated workflows: Monitoring tools detect issues and automatically create incidents in ITSM systems. Changes approved in one system trigger notifications and updates in downstream systems.

Unified visibility: Managers see complete service delivery status across all systems and vendors without logging into multiple platforms or requesting manual reports.

Customer experience continuity: End users submit requests through familiar interfaces while backend integration routes those requests to appropriate specialist teams working in their preferred tools.

The foundation of modern IT service delivery

ITSM integrations form the technical foundation for several critical IT service management approaches:

Service Integration and Management (SIAM): Multi-vendor environments require seamless integration between service provider tools and customer systems to coordinate effectively.

DevOps and Agile IT: Breaking down silos between development and operations depends on integrated toolchains connecting planning, development, testing, deployment, and operations platforms.

Enterprise Service Management (ESM): Extending ITSM practices beyond IT to HR, facilities, finance, and other departments requires integration across diverse service management platforms.

Customer-centric service delivery: Delivering consistent experiences across touchpoints requires integrated systems that maintain context as requests move between teams and functions.

Without effective integration, these modern approaches to IT service management remain theoretical concepts rather than practical realities.

Why service integration has become critical in modern ITSM

Service integration has evolved from a "nice-to-have" technical capability into a strategic necessity. Understanding this shift requires examining how IT service delivery has fundamentally changed over the past decade.

The evolution of IT complexity

Then: Simple, centralized IT (Pre-2010)

• Single IT department handling all technology needs
• Limited number of tools (often a single ITSM platform)
• Requests arrived via email or phone
• Small team of generalist system administrators
• Relatively simple technology landscape

Now: Complex, distributed IT ecosystems (2025)

• Specialized teams for different functions (service desk, infrastructure, security, applications, cloud)
• Dozens of tools serving different purposes and preferences
• Multiple channels for requests (self-service, chat, email, phone, automated monitoring)
• Large, distributed teams with deep specializations
• Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with hundreds of services

The integration imperative: As specialization increased, the connections between specialized functions became more critical to end-to-end service delivery. Each team optimizes for what makes them successful using tools designed for their specific needs—but business outcomes depend on these teams collaborating seamlessly.

Service Integration provides the technical solutions and the approaches needed to make that happen seamlessly. And so, what we see is — the more the specialisms in business and IT grow and mature, the higher the demand for a single point of contact via well-adopted Service Integration increases.

The specialization paradox

Consider how a simple support request has evolved:

2010: Generalist approach

• User emails IT with issue
• System administrator receives email, troubleshoots, resolves
• Administrator replies to user via email
• Total people involved: 2 (user + administrator)
• Total systems: 2 (email + the system being fixed)

2025: Specialist approach

• User submits request through self-service portal
• Service desk agent triages and categorizes
• Request routes to specialized team based on category
• Specialist team uses their dedicated tools for resolution
• Resolution updates flow back to service desk
• Service desk updates user and closes ticket
• Knowledge article created for future reference
• Total people involved: 3-5 (user + service desk + specialists)
• Total systems: 5-8 (portal, ITSM, specialist tools, knowledge base, monitoring)

The challenge: Specialization improves quality and efficiency within each function, but creates friction between functions if systems don't communicate effectively.

The solution: Service integration provides the technical connections and process automation that enable specialized teams to collaborate as effectively as the generalist administrator worked alone—but with the quality and efficiency benefits of specialization.

Which ITSM processes benefit most from service integration

While virtually every ITSM process can benefit from integration, certain processes show particularly high value from integrated approaches.

Continual service improvement

Before examining specific processes, it's important to understand how service integration relates to Continual Service Improvement (CSI).

CSI principles align perfectly with integration approaches:

Iterative improvement: The most effective integration projects use iterative CSI approaches—making higher volumes of smaller changes and improvements to how systems communicate, rather than building one multi-faceted integration solution and releasing it all at once.

Measurement and optimization: Integrated systems provide data for measuring service quality, identifying bottlenecks, and optimizing processes across the entire service delivery chain.

Enabling change: CSI depends on the ability to implement improvements quickly. Integration reduces the friction of making process changes by eliminating manual coordination and enabling automated workflows.

The processes that underpin CSI success tend to orbit around Incident Management, Change Management, and Release Management, which also happen to be the processes that benefit most dramatically from service integration.

Incident management

Incident Management demonstrates perhaps the highest value from service integration because incidents often involve multiple teams, tools, and vendors working under time pressure.

Why Incident Management benefits from integration:

Speed is critical: Every minute counts during incidents. Manual handoffs and coordination delays directly impact service availability and business operations.

Multi-party coordination: Major incidents typically involve multiple specialist teams, vendors, and potentially customers—each working in different systems.

Information centralization: Effective incident resolution requires complete context. Integration ensures all relevant information is available to everyone involved.

Automation opportunities: Many incident response steps can be automated when systems are integrated—from initial detection through escalation, notification, and resolution.

Common Incident Management integrations:

Monitoring to ITSM: Monitoring tools detect issues and automatically create incidents with complete diagnostic information, eliminating delays from manual ticket creation.

ITSM to communication platforms: Critical incidents automatically create dedicated collaboration channels (Slack, Teams) and notify appropriate responders.

ITSM to CMDB: Incident records automatically link to affected configuration items, providing instant access to asset information, dependencies, and change history.

Multi-vendor incident coordination: When multiple service providers must coordinate on incident resolution, integrated ITSM platforms ensure everyone has real-time visibility into status and activities.

ITSM to knowledge management: Successful resolutions automatically suggest knowledge article creation, and relevant articles surface automatically during incident work.

Change management

Change Management involves coordinating activities across multiple teams, getting appropriate approvals, and ensuring changes deploy successfully—all areas where integration delivers significant value.

Why Change Management benefits from integration:

Complex approval workflows: Changes often require approvals from multiple parties. Integrated workflows automatically route change requests to appropriate approvers and track approval status.

Cross-team coordination: Successful changes require coordination between teams responsible for different layers of the technology stack. Integration ensures everyone has visibility into planned changes and their potential impacts.

Risk assessment: Integrated systems can automatically analyze change risk by examining affected configuration items, related incidents, and previous change success rates.

Deployment automation: Integration between change management and deployment tools enables automated change deployment once approved, reducing manual errors and accelerating delivery.

Common Change Management integrations:

ITSM to project management: Complex changes often involve project work tracked in tools like Jira. Integration keeps change records synchronized with project status.

ITSM to deployment tools: Once changes are approved, integration triggers automated deployment through CI/CD pipelines or infrastructure-as-code platforms.

ITSM to CMDB: Change records automatically link to affected configuration items, and CMDB impact analysis informs change approval decisions.

Multi-vendor change coordination: When changes involve multiple vendors, integrated systems ensure coordinated change windows and unified change calendars.

Change to incident correlation: Integration enables automatic correlation between changes and subsequent incidents, improving change risk assessment over time.

Release Management

Release Management bridges development and operations, making it inherently dependent on integration between development tools and operational systems.

Why Release Management benefits from integration:

DevOps enablement: DevOps practices require integrated toolchains connecting development, testing, and operations platforms. Manual handoffs between these functions undermine DevOps benefits.

Automated deployment: Modern release approaches emphasize continuous delivery and deployment. Integration enables automation throughout the release pipeline.

Visibility and tracking: Stakeholders across the organization need visibility into what's being released, when, and with what impacts. Integration provides unified views across development and operations tools.

Feedback loops: Integrated systems enable rapid feedback from operations to development when releases encounter issues, accelerating improvement cycles.

Common Release Management integrations:

Development to ITSM: Development tools (Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub) integrate with ITSM platforms to automatically create release records when code is ready for deployment.

CI/CD to Change Management: Deployment pipelines integrate with change management to ensure releases have proper approvals before production deployment.

ITSM to deployment platforms: Approved releases trigger automated deployment through integration with deployment tools.

Operations monitoring to development: When released features encounter issues, integration ensures development teams receive immediate feedback with complete operational context.

Release to knowledge base: Release documentation automatically flows from development tools to knowledge bases accessible to support teams.

Supplier Management

Supplier management is critically important for service integration because many high-value integrations connect internal systems with third-party service providers and partners.

Why Supplier Management benefits from integration:

Multi-vendor environments are standard: Most organizations work with multiple IT service providers, cloud vendors, software suppliers, and consultancies. Coordinating across these vendors without integration is inefficient and error-prone.

Visibility requirements: Organizations need visibility into what vendors are doing, service quality metrics, and whether vendors are meeting SLAs—information that's difficult to obtain when each vendor works in isolated systems.

Seamless customer experience: End users shouldn't experience friction because different aspects of service delivery involve different vendors. Integration creates seamless experiences across vendor boundaries.

Example integration scenario:

Your organization uses ServiceNow for internal ITSM. You work with an external managed service provider who uses their own ServiceNow instance for managing services they deliver.

Without integration: When issues are escalated to the vendor, your team manually creates tickets in their system (or sends emails), manually tracks progress, and manually updates your system with resolution information. The vendor has no visibility into broader context from your environment.

With integration: Tickets that require vendor escalation automatically create corresponding tickets in the vendor's ServiceNow instance with complete context. As the vendor works the issue, updates flow back to your system automatically. When resolved, both tickets close automatically with resolution documentation synchronized.

The benefits: Easier communication, greater visibility into service requests, reduced reliance on email and phone coordination, and better service quality through complete context availability.

Common Supplier Management integrations:

Customer ITSM to vendor ITSM: Bidirectional integration ensures seamless ticket escalation and resolution coordination.

Vendor platforms to customer monitoring: Vendor monitoring and management tools integrate with customer systems to provide proactive issue detection and resolution.

Multi-vendor orchestration: Integration hubs coordinate work across multiple vendors, routing requests to appropriate parties and maintaining unified visibility.

Contract and SLA tracking: Integration between ITSM and contract management systems ensures service delivery aligns with contractual obligations.

What are the most common service integrations for ITSM teams?

ServiceNow – Jira integration 

ServiceNow is one of the most widely used ITSM tools for medium-large businesses. This is because it has a wealth of features and a great reputation for reliability and scalability. Jira is the most commonly used platform for developer teams to plan and manage projects.

Integrating the two is a staple requirement for IT teams who work closely with both internal and external dev teams, as it allows them to quickly and easily submit, view, and update feature requests and bugs that come to IT via the business. It also comes with the added benefit of creating a more service-focused point of entry for the business into the application development process. 

Read how ServiceNow and Jira can be connected with ONEiO in 10 Steps. 

ServiceNow - Salesforce integration

Salesforce and ServiceNow are common integrations as they are both market-leading agent-based platforms.

What Salesforce can do for allowing the business to interact and manage the customer experience, ServiceNow can do for IT’s capabilities in managing internal service experiences. Integrating the two solutions allows your business to have a more connected and customer-centric approach to ITSM. Amongst other things, it means customers with issues related to IT-managed applications can get helped much more effectively.

ServiceNow – ServiceNow integration

As mentioned in the supplier management example above, a common ITSM integration is connecting one instance of ServiceNow with another.

This is not as easily done manually as you may think, as ServiceNow — like many other ITSM tools — is highly customizable, meaning that what one business is using as the ‘service category field’ might be labeled as something totally different in the supplier's instance. Beyond this, SLAs, escalations, customer data fields, and so on… will all be set up differently. So thoughtful and well-designed integrations like this are an increasingly common requirement within multi-vendor ITSM.

Jira – ZenDesk integration 

Jira and Zendesk are the popular tools of fast-growing startups, SaaS providers, and digital product-led companies.

As mentioned, Jira is used by development teams (big and small) and Zendesk tends to be the ITSM tool of choice for small, customer-centric businesses, as it has really easy-to-use interfaces and lots of integrations to other commonly used SME tools.

This integration helps fast-moving businesses very quickly translate customer conversations into actionable tasks for product managers and developers so that customer needs can be promptly met throughout the development lifecycle.

Implementing and managing ITSM integrations

This was once a slow, manual, and fragile task. Many ITSM integrations were hand-coded, undocumented, and took an age to complete. They would also not be well considered in project plans, particularly when being built into a bid or tender from a supplier or MSP. This is because it has not always been the most glamorous or respected task and behind the scenes, would often be outsourced to a cheap offshore development house (not something MSPs like to share with their customers).

So, in the past IT service integration has been pushed into the shadows, making it even more cumbersome when things go wrong or take too long to do. But times have moved on and we're happy to report that there is another way!

Modern ITSM integrations are run through integration hubs (And integration automation platforms), which use pre-built integrations to create connections such as ServiceNow to Jira, Jira to Zendesk… and Zendesk to Salesforce (…and the list goes on!) so that businesses can get these up and running as soon as possible.

Integration service providers like ONEiO help the world’s fastest-moving businesses gain all the value of high-performing ITSM within complex service ecosystems. ONEiO connects new tools to your established infrastructure, without having to disrupt existing tools or processes and without having to create long-winded projects for each new software solution you add to your integration network.  

ITSM and SIAM are certainly widely accepted and adopted ways of working, but there are consistently evolving solutions you can be leveraging to improve performance and increase the speed at which changes and improvements are made and delivered to customers

The real value and ingenuity come from seeing how integration can enable specialist teams (both inside and outside of IT) to use all their preferred tools, own all their own processes, and manage their own data.

These are things that are often undermined or compromised in large integration projects and lead to people disengaging from a change. So, using more effective integration automation platforms can also quickly support the people and adoption objectives of software integration projects too.

How do you get started?

Every business has challenges around how teams collaborate and share information. Whether it’s coming from a place of tools, data, processes, or services, there are always opportunities to improve.

One of the biggest barriers to acting on these challenges is accepting that it doesn’t have to be this way! Integration-led ITSM improvements at this level are a new way of thinking in this industry, so many IT leaders still think that slow and manual integrations are ‘just how it is’. But this is far from the truth. 

Read more: The Now and Future of Service Integrations

If you'd like to learn more about our approach to improving IT Service Management through integrations, our expert team would be happy to talk to you about your ideas and goals.

We are highly experienced in solving complex ITSM and Service Integration challenges and have developed a SaaS-based, cutting-edge integration automation solution for Service Integration, including a wide range of pre-built integrations for the most commonly used ITSM integration software platforms.


A list of supported integration solutions (endpoints) can be found here.

To begin your journey toward an integrated ITSM ecosystem, get started with a 15-minute assessment call with one of our integration experts.