Enterprise Service Management Integration Framework

[Pramod Mukkamal]

Introduction

We heard from customers that most often they spent lot of time — during HRSD Implementation projects — defining things from scratch such as setting up source, integration services, and designing a mechanism to track execution of integration while they integrate third-party systems. 

ServiceNow’s ‘Enterprise Service Management (ESM)’ framework is created to simplify these mundane, yet repeatable, integration processes by providing a set of reusable components that save time and increase efficiency for maintaining jobs.

Let’s learn more about it:

What is ESM framework?

ESM framework is an application built to provide a consistent way of building integrations for common use cases such as:

• Pulling employee profiles, or
• Pulling tasks

from third-party applications into ServiceNow and pushing data from ServiceNow into third-party applications. It leverages the Flow Designer capability to communicate with external instances and third-party systems.

What are the benefits?

ESM framework provides:

• Reusable common components for integration. The ESM framework contains common components that can be used for integrating your ServiceNow application with third-party systems such as ‘common set of tables, widgets, and APIs to use as building blocks to set up integration flows quickly

• Visualization and tracking through the integration process. In addition, while setting up profile sync and To-dos between ServiceNow and a third-party system, these components visualize and track the integration flow at stages of transformation and mapping, prior to committing to these tables within ServiceNow.

What can you do using ESM framework?

(I) Create a source record that represents the third-party system that integrates with your HR Service Delivery application.

(II) Create an integration service to connect with the third-party system.

(III) Create a scheduled job and trigger the run job flow for the source.

(IV) View details of the source job and service job, such as when did the job begin and end, when did the records start loading into staging tables, or did the job run complete or fail in between.

(V) View tasks that are pulled from the third-party system into Enterprise Service Management Integrations Framework.

(VI) The HRSD Framework Integration and HRSD Integration Framework Complete pre-configured widgets display tasks from a third-party system to the To-dos page in Employee Center.

(VII) Create a transform map to specify data relationships between the import set table and the target table.

(VIII) Use External Interface to view details of records that are being pushed from ServiceNow into a third-party system.

How can I get to use this?

To configure, you must activate the Enterprise Service Management Integrations Framework [sn_hr_integre_fw] plugin by requesting it from the ServiceNow Store 

Will this require special roles?

Yes, the [sn_hr_integr_fw.admin] role. Admin will get access to this role when the plug-in is installed.

Which SKU is ESM framework part of?

Customers must have a license for either HRSD Professional or HRSD Enterprise. And also, must meet these additional system requirements:

• Human Resources Scoped App: Core
• Employee Service Center (included in HRSD Professional and HRSD Enterprise) 

Additional resources and help while you configure

Please consult the Product Documentation titled Enterprise Service Management Integration Framework for details on configuration.

You can check for more details in the NowLearning resource link about ‘HRSD - Integration Options’

Please do let us know if you have more questions while you configure for your customer, by commenting on this post

Happy configuring!

I would like to thank my co-author @Ankita Saha , my reviewers - Uma Gayam and @Rew Adams  in providing the necessary inputs to make this content even more useful.

[Maik Skoddow]

It's not the first time that new cool features are only available via a special product like HRSD although according to the ServiceNow's capability map it should rather belong to the platform and thus be available to ALL users.

Maik

[Pablo Sanz]

Great article!

Reviewing the steps to configure it, I have a doubt and it is where do you specify which system ServiceNow will connect to in order to obtain the information?

Is there any part of the process where the credentials and connections are specified? If so, I can't find it in the documentation, thanks for your help!