CDW ServiceNow Solutions Reviews

We were looking to address our backlog. There was a very large backlog for requests, changes, and problems. We did not have a good prioritization process as well since we are really short-staffed, which was not effective at all. We also brought them in to apply scrum and agile methodologies. They worked and partnered with us to figure out what we wanted to do in terms of prioritization, so we could ramp up work and have expertise in the tool.

There are three main large-scale applications that we use CDW ServiceNow Solutions for:

1. IT service management (ITSM).
2. IT Business Management (ITBM), which is all about managing demands and projects at a large scale.
3. Human Resource Service Delivery (HRSD).

I would assess and value CDW Service Now as high in terms of their expertise when it comes to our organization’s full stack of technologies and how they integrate with ServiceNow. CDW is well-versed in how things talk together. They understand how different ServiceNow stacks need to communicate with our organization.

CDW ServiceNow Solutions is very key and instrumental for our HRSD. They are on time in terms of delivering and working on integration points, e.g., integrating HRSD within ServiceNow with external systems in order to have enough information in the platform coming from the other system and vice versa. 

Within our ITBM, CDW ServiceNow Solutions facilitates and enables project forecasts, demand forecasts, program forecasts, and resource management.

Overall, they continue to provide value. We are growing internally, utilizing ServiceNow more in terms of running our projects in a more agile fashion. I'm not talking specifically about ServiceNow projects. I am talking about enabling the platform so our internal organization's projects are being executed and tracked within ServiceNow using a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). The expectation is that we will grow with them as well as grow in maturity with them.

The most valuable features are their delivery of enhancers and guidance for their practices in general.

CDW applies agile principles and scrum. It also helps out in terms of setting up the right priorities for the entire organization, helping us to understand the best practices on our requests to correctly accommodate certain enhancements and the delivery of work from our development team or their administrators.

We rolled out with CDW as our MSP and their general MSP support is good. They are the ones responsible for our monthly enhancements. They have a development team working with us. They are very good in this area. When we want to contract them for projects outside of their MSP contract, there is room for improvement. They could be better at:

• Understanding our current state of things. 
• Providing more guidance in terms of best practices for general implementation.

Their on-demand project teams need to do a better job in terms of delivering work, providing expertise, and understanding our current state.

We have been with them for about three years.

CDW is doing pretty well in terms of expertise. If I were to rate them on a scale of one to 10, I would give them a nine, because they have a very high level of expertise. They manage their support based on our needs and focus on specific modules within the platform. This makes it quite flexible for us. They are able to pull out specific resources, if needed, in order to deliver work to us.

I like the fact that CDW works in a similar time zone. In other words, they work in the United States, like we do. We don't have issues like we have had with suppliers or vendors where part of their staff is overseas, e.g., India has an 11 to 11.5 hour time difference that delays work. Because of this, CDW's delivery and throughput are much better than we had before.

Positive

Previously, we had engaged with KPMG for seamless support. 

We established a contract with them in order for them to support and maintain our ServiceNow platform. They are our managed service provider (MSP). So, they are responsible for the maintenance and enhancements of our ServiceNow instance through our company.

I would assess them as very high when it comes to ServiceNow best practices. We had another prior vendor, and in comparison, I think CDW is top of the line. If I were to rate them on a scale of one to 10, I would give them a nine.

When CDW came in, ServiceNow was already up and running. After that, they did provide us with a better way going forward to enhance project implementation, including upgrades. So, they have been the ones who have been driving our upgrades. In terms of upgrade implementation, they have been very instrumental in the process and very successful.

My manager was more involved with the initial engagement, but I helped him out. The initial engagement took two to three months to get things up and running.

The initial engagement was only for our internal platform team per, my own manager and myself, who were trying to go through a number of things that we support. After that, it was based on scheduling and interviewing different areas, like product owners, because ServiceNow has many products underneath applications. So, we needed to understand the process, document them, and have them on all our sites. Thankfully, this was before COVID, where we could have an on-site interview and face-to-face conversations with the same folks. That took awhile. In the end, we have about 20 modules with ServiceNow.

Within two months, they were already operating with us. However, in the last month, we had these intervals during the last month where we were running parallel work and weaning off our previous MSP (KPMG). So, the last month was our transition period. 

Also, this was towards the end of the year, November to December into January or February. Things are slowly generated during this time, especially by the second to third week of December. 

When we rolled out with them, we had a number of sessions. They assessed: 

• What was our current state? 
• What was our process? 
• Who were our key players? 
• How did we ingest work? 
• How did we escalate issues?
• If we had too many issues operationally, what was the flow that we followed?

The outcome was great. They also came back when we were moving and going from another MSP (KPMG) to CDW ServiceNow Solutions. The entire transition went smoothly. Overall, our key stakeholders were very pleased because there was no disruption in support. Support and throughput have been improving, so the implementation was successful.

They may provide some pushback when we ask for something, such as, "This might not be the right time," or "There may be a better solution." We expect this level of expertise from them. We do not want them to be just note or order takers. We want them to present us with challenges, when needed or applicable, on the ways things might be accomplished.

Pricing-wise, they are pretty standard for the market. They provide a good value for their pricing.

My manager was still looking at KPMG because he wanted to try and bump up their level of support. We also looked at Linium (Cognizant ServiceNow Services).

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10.

We were looking for a couple things. 

1. Basic ticket handling: When people have issues with the platform, they can put it in tickets or modules to help them get it resolved. This is basically the service desk help for ServiceNow. 
2. Enhancements: When we want to do modifications to the system or add anything that involves coding, we have some hours from them to do that. This is just the management of ServiceNow as well as enhancements to ServiceNow.

We have 38 modules from ServiceNow that we use within our environment. There are the ITSM modules for the ITIL stuff, incidents, problems, changes, etc. We also have the project management modules for managing our projects, tracking time, and reconciling with our financial systems. We then have the HR systems as well as our governance, risk, and compliance modules.

They provide people to support ServiceNow and code on ServiceNow. They didn't create ServiceNow, but provide us support and services for ServiceNow. 

We have about 10 integrations. They maintain those integrations for us, so they are familiar with all of those, and CDW ServiceNow Solution's expertise is high when it comes to this. Their expertise is also high when it comes to best practices related to ServiceNow.

CDW ServiceNow Solution's expertise is high when it comes to ServiceNow. They do a good job of helping us with governance, supporting the system, telling us of new features that are coming out on the system, and developing solutions on top of ServiceNow. They are very proactive when creating problems, when they need to be created.

They maintain monthly sprints now. So, we are doing feature releases every month. 

They are maintaining the backlog and reaching out to people proactively to get stories and solicit feedback. 

They have put in agile methodology for our sprints. We were probably one of the first teams at our company to do that. Now, I think everybody is doing that. 

They run quarterly governance meetings on the platform. 

They demo new features and functions, then make suggestions and guide us where to go with the platform.

We don't have one feature that we consider more valuable than the others.

CDW ServiceNow Solutions provided us with multiple proposals. With the CMDB, for instance, it was a four-phase approach. We have done two or three of those phases as of now. So, they kind of break it up into digestible chunks. We have the option to do the remaining phases. We haven't decided whether we will or not, as we are wrapping up the second/third phases right now.

On the MSP side, it is pretty solid. On the project implementation side, it needs to be a little more authoritative. From a project management standpoint, I would rate them as seven out of 10.

We have been working with CDW for two or three years.

They are being used quite a bit. We have tickets that come in every month. We also have 250 enhancement hours a month that we spend, and we can always use more. However, that is more of a budgeting decision than we don't want to use it more. We just might not necessarily have the budget to pay for more. They are used pretty extensively.

There are around 50 people who regularly engage with CDW, from engineers up to VPs.

The customer support is good. I would rate them as a nine out of 10. They are very responsive and proactive.

The impact of CDW on our ServiceNow implementation has had a very positive impact on our business. We have much quicker ticket resolution times now. We have happier customers who take the time to talk to each of the module owners.

Positive

We used KPMG to do our original implementation. 

From the time that we entered into an agreement to use CDW, it was a quick turnaround to start being able to use their services. We had about 30 days of onboarding, but it was fairly quick. They did everything in our systems.

CDW sits down with you to learn about your current state and desired business outcomes continuously. However, we already had ServiceNow implemented when we brought them on. They have implemented several other modules since then. They did our CMDB. They did some of the PPM rework that we needed. They worked a lot with HR during that implementation. They have done a good job with the requirements gathering as well as guiding us.

CDW provided insights and hands-on experience of ServiceNow led us to be able to get the value more quickly, which is probably the biggest thing.

The pricing is very competitive.

Make sure you have the modules in the contracts you want supported, then put something in there for whatever enhancement hours you want. Try to get some sort of rate card for, "If I spend this many hours, this is the cost."

We looked at KPMG to be our MSP and kind of tried them out. We also looked at a few others. So, we got proposals from DXC, KPMG, and somebody else.

At the time that we were switching, they were called Aptris. We liked their methodology, pricing, and account team overall.

Even if they have to course correct, they do it quickly. That is all I can really ask for. I have been very happy with them. They exceeded my expectations. The amount of rigor that they have brought to our processes is one area. The technical talent that they have has been good, especially their tech leads, and their account managers who really oversee the overall day-to-day of the relationship.

It depends on what you want. If all you need is a developer at a fixed dollar rate, go ahead with that. If you want somebody holistically supporting your systems, then I would go with CDW ServiceNow Solutions.

Overall, I have had very few issues with CDW. I have set expectations about how I want my other MSPs to work, i.e., more like CDW.

As an MSP, I would rate them as nine out of 10.

We are using them to augment our engineering capacity. They are involved with our ServiceNow configuration engineering.

It's hard to retain and find people with the right skill sets. CDW ServiceNow Solutions provided us with capacity quickly. They are generally of high caliber and have enabled us to quickly meet our goals.

For example, they were instrumental in our achieving a re-baselining project. We were taking two legacy ServiceNow instances and combining them into a single, vanilla platform. With CDW's capacity, we were able to achieve our goals.

Before implementing anything, CDW sat down with us to learn about our current state and desired business outcomes. The results we achieved from our ServiceNow implementation are stronger than they would have been if CDW hadn't taken the time to understand our goals.

The feature of their service that has been most valuable is their ability to code without many errors and to configure the product to meet our business requirements. 

CDW's expertise, when it comes to ServiceNow and ServiceNow best practices, is strong. They seem to grasp the business concepts well. They don't need a lot of translation and they tend to respond well when an error has been determined. They don't debate and say, "It's my way or the highway." They are responsive and work well with the business and our engineering leadership.

They continue to seek out additional opportunities on adjacencies and new technologies that are in a crowded space. They need to have more examples in those spaces first, before they try to sell them to us.

For example, they want to participate in our AWS implementation, but it's hard to make a shift from our existing AWS partnerships, given that we haven't seen a lot of examples of work in this area from CDW. They need to find different ways to prove that they can extend beyond their current footprint. It has not been clear how strong their bench is in that area.

We have been using CDW's engineering support for the past three years.

We have had the same footprint with CDW for a couple years and we plan to continue with that footprint. We don't plan to expand it, nor do we plan to reduce it.

They don't do technical support for us, but they respond if we have issues with their configuration.

Our company has been going through significant growth through acquisition, and the companies we have acquired have used a cornucopia of options. Name your flavor and it existed among them. We are creating a standard approach now, and that standard is CDW.

In our organization, the group that we used was Aeritae, and CDW acquired them. We just moved over to CDW as a result.

From the time we entered into an agreement to use their service, we were able to start using it almost right away. They had a pretty good stable of people and I don't remember any major delays.

There wasn't any initial setup required at our end to use CDW's service. 

We have an engineering director and an engineering manager who engage with CDW. And we have an engineering team that does more of the business requirements and the translation of them for the engineering team.

We wouldn't be able to purchase services from them if they weren't within the standard expectations. We're a healthcare company and cannot pay top dollar.

My advice would be to keep it simple. The more vanilla, the better. Listen to the partnership. This type of partnership is not something that you can tell people, across the board, to use. Look at your business requirements, keep things simple, and don't over-engineer your results.

I'm not aware that CDW needed to push back or get us to think bigger as we actually have an industry-leading engineering leadership. CDW has been more of an engineering shop for us, as we have very strong technology capabilities in our organization. It has been more of a partnership versus a consulting/best practices relationship.

The CDW component is new for us in the ServiceNow space because they acquired Aeritae. We use CDW as a partner for procurement and in the accessory and device areas, but as a provider of technology, CDW is new for us. So I can't tell you as a delivery provider how good they are yet, from soup to nuts. Aeritae brought a lot of capabilities with them that didn't exist before, but they only acquired Aeritae in the last six months.

Our expectations have been met in terms of services delivered on time, on budget, and on spec. When I look at our initial expectations regarding the outcome of our work with CDW, and the solution that they ultimately delivered, they have done well. There have been no complaints from my organization on their support, and my team does not have shy taskmasters. If there had been an issue, I would've heard about it.