Bringing PeopleSoft Content into ServiceNow Portals

Integrate PeopleSoft content with your existing ServiceNow portal

Many organizations are asking how they can integrate PeopleSoft with their ServiceNow portal because of the latter’s surging popularity. With the rise of remote and hybrid work driven by the pandemic, employers and employees are relying more heavily on platforms like ServiceNow and using them to create employee destination sites within organizations.

This blog will explain why PeopleSoft customers need to bring PeopleSoft application content and transactions into ServiceNow portals — and how InFlight makes it easy.

We’ll dive into the following topics:

1. Why ServiceNow plays an important role in the employee experience
   
2. Where friction exists in the ServiceNow experience for PeopleSoft customers
3. How InFlight can help you easily eliminate that friction by bringing PeopleSoft content into your ServiceNow portal

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1. The rise of the ServiceNow employee experience

To stay competitive and maintain productivity while managing new ways of working, organizations are spending significant sums of money on ServiceNow portals with the goal of making them the center of gravity for all employees within their organization.

While ServiceNow started as ticketing software for IT service requests, it has emerged as a clear leader in the employee experience arena because it provides a centralized place where employees can easily manage tasks and information. The company has grown rapidly into an application development platform, a workflow engine, and an HR service delivery platform. The workforce disruption caused by Covid-19 has only skyrocketed its popularity.

During the pandemic, enterprises realized ServiceNow’s ability to improve the employee experience for remote and hybrid work and bring key business activities together, centralizing everything from productivity tools to knowledge bases to admin tasks to corporate communications.

Thanks, in no small part, to its role in improving the delivery of digital services for everyone across the organization, ServiceNow owns approximately 40% of market share and has become an “always-on” application where employees spend a significant portion of each day.

The value of a single employee destination

Particularly for remote and hybrid workplaces, ServiceNow enables companies to offer employees a better digital experience. The platform includes a range of portals including the Employee Service Center (ESC) that, similarly to other employee portals, aims to provide a single source of information, content, and functionality that employees need to do their jobs.

So what’s the real value of this unified, user-centric approach? In large part, it’s a non-negotiable factor in meeting employees’ rising expectations for a consumer-grade experience from the tools and systems they use at work. 

As Gartner explains, organizations need to “take a more consumer-centric approach to the way they engage with employees — an approach that is more consistent with how people behave and what they value in the digital world”. That reality is backed by a recent Gartner survey of 5,000 employees revealing that 56% expect to have the same quality of experience at work as they do as a customer.

Today’s workforce expects tools that help them stay connected, informed, and productive no matter where they’re working. And for employers, achieving greater efficiency, boosting productivity, and improving communication all translates to direct benefits for an organization’s bottom line.

By building key moments in the employee journey into a single destination, the goal of the ServiceNow ESC portal is to do all of the above, connecting workers to information and enabling them to complete common tasks without the help of HR. Self-service tools, workflows, conversational AI, and other automated features reduce administrative burden and support employees with fast, easy digital services.

If you’re a PeopleSoft customer, however, you may be reading this and feeling a bit left out of the equation. There are some significant limitations to how well ServiceNow can bring PeopleSoft content and functionality into the Employee Service Center or any other type of ServiceNow portal. Let’s take a look at what some of those challenges are.

2. The disconnect between ServiceNow Portals and PeopleSoft

The key factor in the employee experience we’ve described above is delivering a single destination where users can access everything they need. But are ServiceNow portals like the Employee Service Center truly a one-stop shop for PeopleSoft customers?

Not really. While ServiceNow is, in many ways, rising to the challenge of delivering a consumer-grade employee experience, it falls short in one critical area: integrating live content into the ESC portal from PeopleSoft – which for many global enterprises remains the core application for employee information and self-service transactions.

Rather than delivering fully on the promise of ‘everything in one place’, the ESC portal landing page links out to content in PeopleSoft applications, making it primarily a link farm with few transactional capabilities. 

Accessing self-service content, functionality, and transactions from PeopleSoft requires users to navigate away from the portal and log in to PeopleSoft to access content or transact with the application. This weakens its status as a destination site and disrupts the seamless experience today’s employees expect. Since content and functionality are not self-contained within the ESC portal, the experience can’t be considered truly centralized.

Let’s explore how this situation creates friction, why you using a ServiceNow integration to bring your PeopleSoft content into ServiceNow portals – and how InFlight can help.

Friction in the ServiceNow employee experience

In particular, as employees spend more and more of their time in ServiceNow portals, it’s crucially important to bring downstream content that’s frequently used or difficult to navigate front-and-center into a central employee destination.

Instead, PeopleSoft customers have to leave the portal to manage content in PeopleSoft, such as requesting vacation time, completing timesheets, processing approvals, managing benefits coverage or viewing paychecks. Because PeopleSoft is such a crucial and commonly used enterprise application for employees, the fact that PeopleSoft content isn’t fully integrated with ServiceNow adds friction to the workday.

Having to switch between applications, search for information and learn multiple systems adds complexity back into the process – the very things that an employee experience platform should eliminate.

Wasting time using two different systems isn’t just frustrating for employees. It’s bad for productivity because it adds unnecessary steps to common tasks. And it also means employees may not be taking full advantage of PeopleSoft content, tools, and functionality designed to make their experience easier.

3. Bringing PeopleSoft content into a ServiceNow Portal with InFlight

The good news? You can easily improve the digital employee experience by removing friction from PeopleSoft and ServiceNow. InFlight makes it fast and easy to integrate PeopleSoft and ServiceNow for an improved employee experience.

Unsure of what an employee experience platform is? Learn about it here!

The InFlight Connector for ServiceNow pulls content and functionality from deep within PeopleSoft applications and surfaces it directly within ServiceNow, augmenting the valuable content that’s already there. You can bring a variety of transactions from PeopleSoft into ServiceNow portals – whether those are left in their native fluid or classic state, or fully reimagined by InFlight.

By connecting PeopleSoft and ServiceNow, your enterprise can unlock these benefits and more:

• Increase ROI by better leveraging and boosting the capabilities of all your digital properties
• Save time by eliminating silos between PeopleSoft and ServiceNow, and streamlining workflows in the application where employees already spend time
• Improve the employee experience by delivering modernized, consumer-grade PeopleSoft interactions and content that’s mobile-optimized and responsive
• Build more mass into your organization’s center of gravity and create stickier digital properties that enhance employee satisfaction and productivity

Streamlining the ServiceNow employee experience

InFlight helps you fill gaps in the workflow using the approach that works best for your enterprise: extracting information from PeopleSoft and visualizing it in ServiceNow portals using easy, out-of-the-box widgets; taking PeopleSoft Fluid components and making the native experience visible and transactable in ServiceNow; and fully modernizing transactions by making totally reimagined, consumer-grade PeopleSoft components available in your ServiceNow portals.

By bringing frequently accessed employee-facing content and transactions from PeopleSoft into ServiceNow, you can:

• Easily display up-to-date PeopleSoft information alongside existing ServiceNow content
  
• Mix PeopleSoft widgets and content with information from other applications
  
• Enable users to complete PeopleSoft transactions and make real-time changes to information directly within the ServiceNow portal with updates automatically written back to the system of record
• Integrate content and transactions from any PeopleSoft application, including PeopleSoft HCM, Financials, CRM or Supply Chain
• Deliver a fully reimagined, user-friendly, mobile-optimized UX with InFlight-enhanced PeopleSoft components in ServiceNow
• Create webhooks for PeopleSoft transactions that trigger ServiceNow processing and workflows in real time, turning ServiceNow into the centralized employee workflow engine that your organization needs

With InFlight, when employees access their personalized portal landing page, they can see frequently needed information, and actions from both PeopleSoft and ServiceNow bubbled up to the top. Single sign-on capabilities mean there’s no need to log into PeopleSoft to complete transactions or find information. 

Everything they need is available at a glance and they can quickly complete PeopleSoft tasks in one convenient place without navigating away, including viewing paychecks, tracking vacation days and sick days, managing timesheets, updating personal information, and more. 

Organizations have the flexibility to tailor the user experience to their employee needs, choosing which PeopleSoft content and transactions are available through ServiceNow portals.

Delivering a consumer-grade PeopleSoft user experience

In addition to integrating PeopleSoft content, functionality, and workflows within ServiceNow, InFlight removes friction from the PeopleSoft experience. Through an enhanced consumer-grade UI, you can completely reimagine the user experience of PeopleSoft transactions within ServiceNow.

InFlight modernizes PeopleSoft Fluid and Classic pages to provide enhanced usability that makes PeopleSoft as easy and enjoyable to use as a consumer smartphone app. All PeopleSoft components get a brand-new, responsive, and mobile-optimized UI complete with a beautiful, modern design. 

With such a dramatic improvement to the PeopleSoft employee experience in ServiceNow, you’ll see dramatic increases in adoption, lower support costs, and better returns on your digital investments.

Creating webhooks for PeopleSoft transactions

InFlight also helps you enhance and streamline common workflows between PeopleSoft and ServiceNow. Webhooks allow you to easily fold your PeopleSoft applications into completely new processes and workflows that run on ServiceNow by wiring PeopleSoft transactions to hit ServiceNow incidents.

When employees update information in a PeopleSoft component that InFlight has brought into ServiceNow, the transaction goes against PeopleSoft, which does all its processing and server validation to apply the full business logic to the request. 

If the transaction is valid and conforms to PeopleSoft business logic and security rules, PeopleSoft updates the value and sends an ‘all clear’ to the client side. When that confirmation is received, InFlight sends a message into the ServiceNow Workflow Listener, so ServiceNow is able to receive the updated data, kick off a ServiceNow workflow, and update incident values and parameters. This entire process happens in real time with information updated instantly.

Deliver the best employee experience – easily

Ready to make your ServiceNow portal a true one-stop shop for everything employees need? By bringing PeopleSoft into ServiceNow, you can unify employee-facing content and transactions within a single destination, delivering a truly seamless, consumer-grade experience and ensuring your digital properties get maximum traction. 

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