all right we're here today with uh cerna solutions and partnering with perspectium for for this webcast this is um extending servicenow workflows to partners it is episode three of an ongoing kind of webcast series called solving servicenow data challenges so thank you for joining us i'm josh cicero i'm a practice manager at cerner solutions we provide uh servicenow services across the breadth of the servicenow platform but are especially known for data integrations you know from servicenow to to all of the other kind of enterprise platforms to solve various various challenges with us today we've got dave wesley from perspective dave thanks josh dave wesley here i'm a solutions consultant with prospectium we're focused on integrations in and out of servicenow both at high volume high velocity and today's focus of course on e-bonding or service bonding systems together thanks dave um just a quick announcement before we get started uh some of you may have seen this already um certain solution is is is merging with evergreen systems and nova scale two other really highly respected partners in the servicenow space the end result of this is going to be a new company called third era uh we're going to be entirely focused on servicenow trying to deliver kind of bigger better services across the entire servicenow platform looking to do some of the the you know ride the digitalization wave right where there's there's very focused of worker experiences and kind of other really cool outcomes on the platform please do visit thirder.com to join our emailing list or connect to our new social pages as i was saying uh you know we've had this is the third episode of of the series right solving servicenow data challenges uh the first two episodes achieve data transparency and securing servicenow data against the unexpected can be found on youtube uh and so thank you for joining us today with extending servicenow workflows to partners a quick note before we really dive into things please do ask questions throughout this is kind of more of a discussion on some of these topics that are interesting from an integrations perspective today and we want to make sure that we're answering any questions people have we'll try to do that either real time or uh you know at the end uh as we circle back so feel free to post uh questions in the q a as you have them so uh i guess i guess the thing i you know we should start with is what do we mean by by extending workflows and and why would we do that and you know there's a number of reasons some of those here on the screen but um you know you'll hear us refer i guess a little bit today to the concept of e-bonding and e-bonding is the electronic integration between you know two records probably in two different systems that represent pieces of a process and so as those as those records are moving through their life cycle and people doing their work in both places you know a lot of times those you know in order for the piece of the process to communicate and become one total total workflow right we've got to communicate data back and forth and traditionally that was a swivel chair activity that was something we did via email but there were lots of challenges introduced with that so more and more today you see this concept of hey how do we connect these things together electronically so they share the necessary data in real time and provide lots of benefits so we'll be talking about that a little bit today in in the context of a couple examples dave i don't know if you want to kind of add some flavor there yeah absolutely thanks josh so we find oftentimes when we're integrating systems together that there's several different topics and concepts that come up as to why and the requirements around those um there's several mentioned here they're incredibly important i think one of those i like to start with is you know the the wasted time and or letting people work in the systems that they prefer to interact with context switching can sometimes cause slowdowns you have to get your view set up on multiple systems and inherently you then run into maybe data integrity issues as well between the systems so that swivel chair swivel seat approach is really has a very hard ceiling on it of how quickly a person can do that work without making mistakes um yes that's one area to to maybe kind of start with but uh great great topics on the slide here we can dig into as well perfect yeah i mean there's so many examples where you know you that switch of context is not just unpleasant right it costs all kinds of time and you lose transparency into where things stand right you don't have that kind of single pane of glass so certainly uh uh probably the one that i would focus on the most a good call out so we've got kind of we want to talk about sort of two models of this i think the the first is this idea of uh inner organizational workflows right so so how do i or what are the scenarios where i as a organization have a system of record in this case servicenow and and want to interact with you know work management systems other places and you know i think a real a couple really common examples are you've got maybe a vendor right who's providing service for something and it could be aws it could be you know somebody else who's using servicenow to provide service to you maybe for a part of your network right or a subset and there's scenarios where you're managing kind of your worker or your customer experiences and servicenow but you've got at some point escalate effectively outside your organization and the legacy version of that was well i've got a i've got an email return submit take it somewhere else but then i lose that link that transparency for the user of hey where's my stuff at right because statuses are destroying it there's all kinds of challenges so we're seeing more and more and more and more that organizations are looking to you know drive integrations to make these things kind of seamless in real time and specifically i've seen two recently they're kind of interesting one is you know a company hired a vendor to manage their data centers but they still provided their own end-user support right so they they had their servicenow instance and they had their employees and customers that were coming to servicenow instance to report issues and sometimes though that issue would be identified hey this is part of server infrastructure and it would get escalated to this third party who's also using servicenow but you know how we do that they chose to you know build an e-bonding integration to connect those things so that the when it was assigned to a group that automatically get created a vendor system etc uh and then another one we saw is is very similar but it was you know instead of data centers it was for the voip network and so you had your voice over ipv phone infrastructure and you're paying a third party to support it same kind of thing you know you might get stuff that you support and then stuff that's supported by them and how do we escalate that kind of outside the system and both of those scenarios ended up being e-bonding integrations uh so i don't know i know dave you've got a couple you know you're seeing a ton of this as well right are there is that a pretty i guess is that is that pattern consistent like that or have you seen other versions yeah josh i think those are great examples and we certainly do see those types of use cases absolutely um a couple others that we've seen that kind of dovetail into your examples would be um kind of what we've solved for a couple of our customers uh zurich and edna and that's connecting out to um affiliates right so not just connecting to an msp but even connecting to partner companies affiliate companies those do become inter-organizational um and so those those have their kind of kind of to your point they have those challenges but also to your point we get into slas we get into contractual agreements between these systems we oftentimes run into the scenarios too where by its nature one company doesn't own both of these systems or three or four or five systems these are going to be owned and maintained by other systems or by other organizations they are oftentimes contractual obligations between the two to to complete the process there are oftentimes legal or regulatory compliance issues as well that must be met so when you get into the design of these types of relationships between systems you also are uncovering process relationships between the companies um so do we need to have extra security do we need to have both in transit and at rest security do we need to have some type of data guarantee or or reporting that shows me my integration's working and that i can prove it works and we don't get into a finger-pointing situation of it's not working it's your fault no it's it's your fault and then of course how do we like you said how do we want to track slas how do we do reporting on this how can i ensure my customer that i am servicing their needs to the to the requirement and or how can i ensure my emsp or my provider is is is doing that for me we have customers that sync out both to their msps but then they also sync to their customers as well so they're providing the service to their customer and then as you mentioned they're escalating maybe specialty work to one of their mssps yeah that's actually something we've seen a bunch is you know hey i'm paying this big contract for a vendor to support me in some capacity and there's sla obligations in the contract so part of the reason i need this integration is so that i have like a digital record of did they meet their contractual obligations or not you know because there's there's a huge potentially amount of money and then quality of service obviously driven based on whether or not they're kind of meeting expectations so that's yeah that's a that's a real good one and then there's obviously the other example too where and you may have mentioned this but you know maybe i'm uh like an enterprise service provider like a an msp right and i've got um a bunch of customers that are all managing some subset of the work right in in their environment and i i now am trying to provide them service the way they're used to it in their environment but i really don't want my agents logging in 15 places too right so it's a that's the consolidation lens of it too absolutely yep and and do i have to manage all those licenses and how people log in what happens so onboard a new agent what happens to for an off-boarding agent do i have to make sure all of my customers systems are secure right so yeah there's an awful lot of workload if we don't have an automation around this also you even get into because these are disparate organizations they may not want to give logins to the other organizations so is there a method we have one of those at prospectium where everything's outbound into us versus versus inbound well that tends to help sometimes again in highly regulated environments where you can't inbound into a firewall you must outbound some of these systems may be cloud-hosted some may be a traditional on-prem and you have to have a method to then outbound from the on-prem solution into the cloud solution you know if it's a mix-and-match environment we even have um you know the ability for someone if if they're a servicenow customer use an integration hub we've got a spoke that's a quick and easy way to maybe make a connection again if that meets the requirements but yeah to your point um knowing that it completed having proof that it completed having that record of it worked and then even the failure modes what happens if it doesn't work do how can i quickly rescind it what if it goes down you know at 2am local time did my messages eventually get there or do i have to pick apart what failed and how it failed in recent messages yeah and all that super critical right for the examples you you shared around obviously regulatory compliance and even just making sure that that we deliver the message so that the issue is going to be remediated whatever that might be so these are these are all things you know obviously there's a lot of permutations of this the core concept is pretty pretty simple right it's it's hey i'm i'm automatically sending data back and forth to to keep process components in sync right but there's there's lots of reasons people you know extra reasons people do this and then there's lots of technical complexity as you described around doing it really really well and and this is something that you know perspective is doing as a service right yup that's correct we we are integration as a service we're providing this um focus 24 7 365 on message flow on making sure the messages that were sent were received and vice versa from both systems and we have a robust queuing mechanism as well for capturing um glitches network glitch um the other system that you don't control has to go down for maintenance for two hours what does that mean it just means it keeps running and the moment it's back up we're all queued back up again so yep this is uh these are the areas we work in specifically for our enterprise customers all over the world and it's too it's designed to give that robust architecture approach and that 24 7 approach and also as these systems upgrade over time so as the next version of servicenow or jira or whatever may come online it's our responsibility to make sure the integration still functions with the new versions so take some of that ongoing development work out of out of the responsibility of the of the customer awesome it's you know it's it's something we've dealt with a lot right where we've we've had to build integrations for these folks and and one of the things that that perspectium offers right is is a kind of centralized way to manage that across you know a lot of scenarios going a lot of different places uh let me bring this back up especially when we get into the um kind of the intra organizational as as you uh as you're bringing your slides back up is um the ability to then by by default we bi-directional by default we have attachments we have you know we can share the audit that we can share the journal but also the ability to that if if i'm an msp or or if i'm a customer my msp is already using prospectium what's the easiest quickest way for me to connect to them and it could be like i mentioned before it could be a spoke out of the integration hub which we have or it could be a different type of of solution where you're connecting uh directly it's more than just mapping data across it's actually the entire architecture of the process and from the msp's perspective or from a customer's perspective if i have solved servicenow to servicenow once give me a quick and easy way to do that over and over and over and that's what we do we have a common data model for mapping and we make it as easy as possible in a graphical environment no code solution to very quickly you know take a template from one integration apply it to the next make some tweaks if you need to and your and your flowing data it's designed to be a very fast and scalable solution once you know that you need more than one yeah very cool and i mean this is something we've we've seen kind of i guess for years at customers right it's it's a problem we've solved and it sounds like you guys have just taken that experience that you've had across you know many use cases and and kind of built a template or the platform on which to repeat that right yeah exactly our specialty is service in and out of servicenow so servicenow is always one element of the integration and so that's where we spend our time and that's where we have years and years of experience is getting data in and out of service now either just a one direction bi-directional multi-directional you know two three systems working together and that's our focus so lessons learned and implementing this for enterprises around the world we bring that to each engagement that we have awesome and then the other scenario so we were talking about inner organizational right we're connecting in third parties and this is you know this is going to feel really similar but this is one we see almost almost more right which is you've got you know within your organization you've got different teams doing different parts of things on different systems so you could have teams that are doing stuff in uh you know the system you're using to drive procurement supply chain it could be you know could be the sales team in salesforce it could be um you know uh maybe one of the development teams in jira or azure devops right and in all these scenarios if we want to provide that kind of like enterprise experience with that single pane of glass where we can do all our centralized reporting and do all of our outcome management and customer support in one place we've got to connect that stuff together and that's something that i think every organization looks at and says yeah that would make sense but how do i get there yeah absolutely and and the use cases technically are similar but the processes are often quite different so what we discussed in the previous slide around slas and reporting and creating multiple connections out to multiple customers or creating connections out to your msps whichever direction you're going those things are a bit different when we move inside the organization because by its very nature you as an organization now own all these systems but that also means we get into an entirely different level of processes right where you might just share a few fields with a customer in msp because that's all you really need to do to get that process completed here oftentimes you're moving much more data and just focusing on mapping is is not necessarily a little bit too tight of a view sometimes we have to step up into a higher level and really think of the entire process which of these systems for example would be the data owner of certain data right yep all the all the systems need to read the data but only certain systems can update or modify the data some some of these may flow one directional some may flow two directional you get into much more of data ownership and the minutiae of process because these are different teams they want to work on their own systems the fields don't always match there's been customizations over time so overall what do i have to know from these other systems to complete my process on platform and i'm done and and then the rest of the team gets the update they get the status things flow like they should even getting into things like task and subtask you know for a particular process or approvals for a request or change management change management approvals across multiple systems how do you handle that though you start to get to get a bit more complex sometimes when you're staying inside the organization yeah two of the things we've helped solve well i guess three maybe so for specifically you know um one of the things i can think of is um servicenow you know has has this great referential library of things right so you have an incident you've got a ci on it there's attributes in the ci that tell you about where it is and how important it is and who's responsible for it and that's just one of many examples you mentioned approvals right potentially related tasks but then if i'm saying that data to like a jira issue i really only have one record to send it to and i'm not going to have all the relational data kind of build out the way it is in service now so that that transform of data from you know here's how it's laid out different places in servicenow to collect the right attributes of related data format them the right way and stick them in one place so that the person's right information is a big challenge right and that's one i think you kind of mentioned yeah absolutely what what is a single process on one system might be two or three processes on the other system um we're not even tape where i mean i mean and as you mentioned multiple tables right multiple tables of that are related to actually put together a process so yep those are those are things we we solve those are those are kind of the the level of technical not only technical but process challenges that we tend to focus on again in and out of servicenow to one or multiple systems so it could be in your example we're just going servicenow in salesforce or it could be we go salesforce in from a customer service now for the general i.t they've got to kick it to a development organization they prefer to work in jira or devops or yeah i love i love this example multiple jiras in one organization that that happens too so yeah well you let you let all these all these hero developer teams right who are building really cool stuff and and they and they're very technologically competent so they're going to spin up the tool that works for them and a lot of times you end up with kind of like fragmented technology right right and and instead of trying to consult a force of consolidation let's just integrate them and let them work in the system they they already have right yeah we do that today for you know a few different customers who who need to connect we we do that for for paychecks as an example i can mention uh with their service not a jira and we have other customers as well that um for that use case right is to escalate to the team let the team work in the tools they use let them let them work in that that environment that they are in every day it makes everyone more efficient and then when you have the controls in place of what's a required field how are we going to map the statuses to your point one item in jira may feed into two you know two processes in service now that that's when things can really start to sing and those systems can start to work together in a very process oriented way yeah the other thing that's really interesting about this is i think it's more common to have systems effectively daisy chained together across a process right you maybe have one system for managing recruiting and then it feeds data into your your people management system right and then and then that feeds data into service now and service on feed stay somewhere else and and you end up with and you mentioned this earlier i think that there's kind of more data mapping complexity or it's beyond data mapping when it's within an organization so you got to worry about obviously what you mentioned which system's going to be the source of truth for which data but the other thing you got to worry about is downstream dependencies right so you might have to collect a lot more data uh inbound to service now not necessarily because you need it all but because the system you're going to be sending it to needs absolutely yep absolutely so you may collect fields from jira that servicenow team doesn't use whatsoever but the salesforce team has to have it or vice versa maybe the entitlement to the customer that lives in salesforce has to be visible you know through the change management process so even though the middle system may not use the data you get the data there so you could you know sync it with others um as needed yeah it's it's we you know as we've designed bunches of these in the past it's always it's always this thing where you you work with folks and and they kind of know you know they've got they've got the best understanding of the processes on either end but but sometimes oversimplify the complexity of just mapping all the pieces to make it seamless and as you start getting some of these discussions people people really you know both get excited and potentially a little bit overwhelmed by by the amount of things to consider yeah yeah and i'm i'm sure josh you've seen this where maybe initially a kind of a one-off solution works and then you've got another and another but they were never really designed together as a holistic approach yeah and now you're just trying to keep these pieces together but you you're straining you're straining at the ability of those initial you know solutions yeah absolutely yeah and and then the other part of this right is we let's assume these are globally distributed systems right so we have to be able to work globally we have to be able to work you know how do you want to handle different time zone issues different language packs and different systems if that's something to think about how do you want to handle failure modes and reporting and visibility because you know even though these are internal systems they're still critically important you have to know they're functionally you have to trust the solution and what's that troubleshooting methodology look like do i have to go wake up you know a developer or do i have a way i can do some initial troubleshooting in a in a centralized location so again a lot of the things we talked about earlier even with security and encryption and so on would come into play here obfuscation gdpr and so on because there might be pii data or other types of identifiable data that one team can see but another team should not see so those all come into play as well as is how do i pass this across in a compliant way also yeah yeah and that's something we're hearing about a lot now right we got uh you know ccpa in california we got gdpr obviously in the eu and then there's versions of it in canada and new york so people are people are paying a lot more attention to it i think it's coming and and um you know having having some visibility on to or you know being aware right that that's something right to be concerned about in advance is certainly forward-looking which is awesome the days of just sending an entire table i think are kind of sometimes somewhat coming to an end i can't just share everyone's data with everyone in the company anymore like like in the years past so well and part of the problem with that is like you can't you can't deal with compliance just globally right you you have to deal with it when in these integrated systems you have to take that into account at every step and and that's that's you know a level of kind of uh detail that that people it's a transition right because we're used to writing a policy and saying people go follow this and then it's there's not as much management required at the individual system level and now that's changing um so there's a ton of complexity here there's a lot to consider you know it's it's something that that we have uh experience helping customers with the with in the past and perspective perspective also has uh has a bundled uh integration as a service solution to help solve some of these problems but um you know hope hope that uh this was interesting from uh you know things to consider perspective and and use cases and whatnot maybe it got some of you guys thinking if anybody has any additional questions please put them in the chat i think we addressed uh one or two as part of the uh you know some of some of the conversation um one of the one of the ones that was mentioned is that first slide should should probably be bi-directional that is that is correct so we will make that update um you know perspective is is pushing and pulling data in and out of service now and in the use cases customers are looking for that's that's almost always the case it's very rarely just a pusher pull so yeah if anybody has any questions stick them in the chat now um and while you know while we let you guys go we do want to continue the conversation so uh on the screen you'll find links for uh you know certain solutions and perspective please please check us out you know like share follow all of those things we do today um and thank you for your time today yep thank you everyone it was a pleasure and um on the perspective information uh feel free to check out our website we do have an upcoming webinar next on march 3rd is our next one as well so uh for review any of you in the servicenow ecosystem uh the servicenow which doctor is joining us for that one awesome that's that's uh sounds very cool we'll make sure to tune in thanks josh all right thank you guys