Digital Integration / Business Applications and/or Application Services

[Peter Spuijman]

Good morning,
we have starting test on the use of digital integrations within the enterprise architecture workspace.
OOB, there are fields for the provider BA & digital interface on the one hand, and the subscriber BA and digital interface on the other.
Looking through literature, I find "In ServiceNow, digital integrations should primarily be managed at the Application Services level, rather than the Business Application level. While Business Applications are important for representing the overall business capabilities, Application Services offer a more granular and operational view, making them ideal for tracking and managing integrations. ".
That indeed sounds more logical, but I would be very happy with some advice on setup & best practices (Bruno or Mark, your input would be highly appreciated 😉
Many thanks in advance

[Jonathan Schnei]

 Hi Peter, 

My understanding is that the digital integration record is meant to be used strategically by EA to understand what applications are integrated with each and the details of the interfaces between them. In that way, the Digital Integration record doesn't "care" what instances are integrated with which, just that an integration exists. We can then make strategic decisions, which would impact all deployments of an application, with the complete information of the integration available.

However, at the Service Instance layer we are interested in the operational integrations between different instantiations since the specific impact of an IPC on the technical stack is operationally important. That's why at the Service Instance the CI relationship is used to connect the specific instances. The rel_ci record does not contain information on the integration beyond the direction and type since operationally, that is what matters.

That's my take but I'd also love to hear what the SN folks think.

[Mathew Hillyard]

Hi @Peter Spuijman,

I would add to the comment from @Jonathan Schnei above to say that in practical terms a good use case for Digital Integrations is when you want to track the flow of data between applications and how they interface.

The regular Depends on::used by relationship between App Services is only really relevant for service impact. There is also a Sends data to::receives data from relationship which may be more relevant; however when calculating impacted services on Incident and Change (if you bring in "parent" app services as well, which doesn't happen OOTB) you risk having potentially hundreds of impacted (app) services in certain scenarios (particularly Change Requests). It also doesn't state what data is being sent/received, or how (the interface).

A second use case could be a cyber risk audit where you are asked for a list of all the APIs and their interfaces.

I hope this helps!
Mat