ServiceNow integration with third-party RPA tools - possible issues

[SC17]

Hello.

Can someone give me examples of why we shouldn't let an external third-party RPA tool access ServiceNow?

I am looking into possible security reasons, performance reasons that we may be missing.

Governance and security is key, we already looking into OAuth, restricing access through roles and ACL's, etc.

Thanks.

[Peter Bodelier]

Hi @SC17,

I can't really see something against it. However I am wondering why you would do this at all.

I've always seen RPA tools as helpful when an application does not have other integration options such as REST or SOAP available. As ServiceNow has lots of integration options... What is the use case here?

[SC17]

Hi Peter. The issue is that this external partner already has in place a RPA solution that they want to take advantage of. Because they want to retain their processes,  we proposed a different approach. We would consume an API, sending the payload, and then receive a response payload after the RPA does it's own thing. However, they want to use screen scrapping and we already explained that this approach is not the best one because of performance, data integrity and possible GDPR infringements. We have a call upcoming and I was looking into something else I might be missing.

If you have any ideas I would appreciate.

Thanks.

[Peter Bodelier]

Thank you for the background.

As long as you provide the right access, so they can only access what they should see (as you would do when using an API), I don't see any operational issues here.

There may be more maintenance needed on their part, when UI changes happen during development.