HR & IT Together

We embarked on a project with a customer that was looking to implement HR while already having IT installed on their ServiceNow instances. Their goal was to achieve a zero touch first day onboarding experience where we could utilize Orchestration and ServiceNow’s HR Service Delivery solution. After talking with them and going through their design workshops we landed on what turned out to be a successful architecture to achieve a high level of automation in their onboarding process.

We started at the source of their user data, their Application Tracking System (ATS). We were able to utilize the native ServiceNow web services to pull the applicants that accepted their new position and created HR Profile records. This is where the fun begins! Once the HR Profile is created it kicks off a workflow that uses AD Orchestration activities to create the user in AD, add them to the necessary groups to give them rights to certain things in their environment, and also create proxy email addresses for the users all automatically.

We could then leverage Lifecycle Events to start the Onboarding process utilizing the Activity Sets to determine when the different activities, or tasks, get spawned and also used HR Criteria to determine if certain activities should be created for different users based on their region and department.

This allowed each location within the organization to present their new hires with a welcome email, directions, and documentation to review specific to the location at which they will work. Furthermore, some locations receive a higher number of new hires on a regular basis. So, for these locations, parts of the onboarding process that a manager would otherwise be doing is automated. The beauty of the LifeCycle events engine is that each location was able to create an entirely unique end user experience, perform location specific automation, and share in the underlying orchestration to AD. All of the workflow associated with onboarding an employee, including HR tasks and IT tasks, are stored in one ServiceNow instance allowing for a single system of record for reporting and benchmarking business process efficiency.

When people think of LifeCycle events they often think of Onboarding, but let’s not forget that Terminations can also have location specific requirements. For this implementation, we had location specific tasks based on location and we were again able to reuse our Orchestration to AD.

There are 2 scenarios addressed with this implementation. A “standard” termination would set a future date in AD which would then disable their AD account on their last day worked. An “expedited” termination uses the Orchestration to disable AD accounts immediately. Since the requests were coming into ServiceNow, we were able to set the values on the HR Profile and those changes would be reflected in AD at the appropriate times.