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.

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.

Why is Service Integration so popular in ITSM?

The IT industry has become increasingly complex. The software solutions themselves may look and feel simpler than ever before, however, the ecosystems they power, the supplier networks required to make great IT happen, and the reach of IT have all extended massively.

When the reach and complexity of services grow like this, the connections between each service become more important to the end-to-end delivery of absolutely everything. This is because each function specializes more as it grows, thus making the need for them to focus on what makes them successful more narrow.

For example, a few system administrators receiving support tickets by email have become a small team of agents receiving requests via ticketing software. Today, this has become a set of specialist teams, working across multiple touch points such as self-service, desktop support, vendor management, and so on. As teams grow and specializations expand, the need to provide the right tools, processes, and skills to each function matures with them.

But with more functions, tools, and people, comes the need for them to better collaborate.

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.

Which ITSM processes benefit most from Service Integration?

This is an important question to ask but at the risk of sounding too consultative… there is no right answer!

We've talked about CSI (Continual Service Improvement) and the significant part that has to play in high-performing ITSM. And, the processes that underpin the success of CSI tend to orbit around Incident Management, Change Management, and Release Management.  

The reason Service Integration fits in neatly here is that the most effective integration projects are those that use the iterative CSI approach, making higher volumes of smaller changes and improvements to the way systems talk to each other. As opposed to building one multi-faceted integration solution and releasing it all in one go. Mature and well-managed Change and Release processes handle this really well.

Supplier management is also an important process to take seriously in Service Integration, as many of the high-value software and service desk integrations will be with third parties and partners. For example, connecting your internally-used instance of ServiceNow to your service provider's so that tickets and data can easily flow between them brings a lot of value to your ability to collaborate over the resolution of escalated issues. Well-implemented Service Integration for supplier management enables easier communication, and greater visibility of service requests and reduces the reliance on email and telephone communication. 

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.