ServiceNow Reviews

The most valuable features at this point in time for me is the ability for tracking changes, for tying changes in the problem tickets together, tying incidents together to the problem tickets. The interaction between our user to IT aspect, from top to bottom, has been fantastic. Whereas users submits a problem because they have a problem, then we've got to find out if it's a bigger problem, or if it's bug, or SDLC, all this stuff. For me in my role at this point in time, which is changing, it's just tracking everything from bottom to top. We're making sure that stuff is getting done and then communicating back to teams, and it's a full loop.

ServiceNow was implemented over seven years ago. When I came on it was already implemented and I didn't have much of a role in getting ServiceNow changed, add-ins, whatever. They weren't reaching out to other companies. I was basically brought in to do monitoring buildouts, and get our very baseline infrastructure more organized.

I actually don't know. To be perfectly honest, I feel that just about any tool, as long as they have the same offerings, can be modified to fit the company that is attempting to use it. Take a look at an ERP solution. ERP has been around for a lot longer, to a certain degree than say ServiceNow and there is a massive amount of offerings. You can go with SAP. You can go with Oracle. I can't even remember the other guys' names. No matter what, you can always make them work for your company.

They may not have been the best choice for you, maybe there are pluses and minuses. Once you actually get into the application, you start figuring it out at that point it's like, "Well, it would have been better if we went with this, if we focus more on this." The thing is once you get an offering, you still have the ability to go in and configure it to your heart's desire. ServiceNow, it's the full suite of offerings. You have a lot more to sit in and actually go in and configure, as opposed to it's just another ITIL based application that I can sit in and configure.

I know there are places that they can do better at. While I'm not an administrator, I'm not sitting there configuring it, I know our person who does configure it does have his foibles. There are certain things that are difficult to get out of ServiceNow, which is why I suggested going to partner companies that are using ServiceNow already in your similar environment. You go to ServiceNow and say, "Hey. This is what we want to do. How can we accomplish this?" ServiceNow says, "You can do it any way you want."

It's like, "That's not an answer." It's like, "What should we do? We need guidance." Well, "No. you can do anything with it." Okay. That doesn't quite help me as a user, and future administrator, or as an executive. I'm sure it sounds great for an executive, but when it comes down to it, when it starts growing in your own environment, executives starts asking questions, "Why hasn't it been doing this?" It's like, "We don't know how to get that matured within our own environment." It really comes down to I think they can improve upon. They are doing that here with the networking, but for as themselves, have their own best practices to a certain degree.

To a degree, yes it's stable, but mostly it's due to data center issues on their side, or it's come down to network issues on our side. Since it's external, it's not internal, you're looking at having to deal with Internet weather, or data center hosted environments, or our instance had the issues, which is pretty rare.

It's been a long time. It's been a very long time. I think mostly they had a roll back of, not a build or an update. It was some type of data change, but I don't recall the details as it was several years ago.

I wouldn't know because I don't actually handle any of that aspect. Again, I'm still pretty new to actually having my hand in helping with ServiceNow. I don't have any of the hands-on experience. I'm more of a user at this point than an administrator of certain degrees.

I've used many other types of applications such as HEAT, or Remedy, any of those guys and a couple others that I can't remember the name of. They're all customizable to a point. Obviously, not many of those previous ones actually had a full ITIL buildout, or full offering as ServiceNow does. From my point of view and my aspect, I'm more concerned about user experience, and more concerned about backend experience as an IT professional coming in and trying to fix issues, and track said issues. ServiceNow has a much bigger offering in the sense that you've got new changes. You've got your problem ticket findings. You've got tracking for CIs, and the CMDB database, and sitting on the backend trying to provide all that data for those tickets, and whatnot, throughout the company. It makes it a lot easier. It's definitely a one-stop shop for being able to actually come in and help your users, but also help your full infrastructure, your backend.

From what I've heard, and all I can go off of is hearsay, it was pretty easy comparatively. I don't know what they were using before for any ticket tracking system, but that's initially what they jumped into was ticket tracking. We needed something to be able to support our IT infrastructure and our service desk. They also wanted to be able to track changes, and do that. It was just like, "Okay, we'll start with this, and start growing more and more." It turned into quite a bit more. We have definitely stepped up using a lot more of the offerings that ServiceNow has, mostly because we have to, to some degree, to be able to make things a lot more efficient. It's worked for us from what I can tell.

You want to sit there and plan. You probably don't want to turn everything on right from the get go either, because then you're just going to overload yourself. The same goes with any type of a larger offering that has hooks into other aspects of your infrastructure. If you turn everything on, you're just going to get overwhelmed, and not actually have proper resources to be able to handle those. It's always start turning things on, start figuring out what the workflow is, and go from there.

Make sure you flesh out what you're doing. Honestly, I see all the pitfalls are the ones where you'll have a misunderstanding, or make a bad choice in configuration. If you believe that the offering is going to work for you, then you need to make sure you reach out to people who are going through similar situations, or rather it's three years in advance in your same situation. Find another partner company that has already gone through the preliminary, but not too far in the future because then you just look and say, "Wow. They completed so much. How are we ever going to get there?" A year or two, maybe three, and talk with them, figure out what their pitfalls were, a similar type company hopefully.

We use ServiceNow for asset management. I manage the IT contracts that are in ServiceNow with the metadata that we have. I'm the associate director for IT contract assets.

When we can centralize all the contract information, ServiceNow will give us better control over asset management and technical debt.

ServiceNow is not meeting our expectations. The contract module is quite rudimentary. It doesn't support contract line items, which are subdivisions of contracts in VA. The result is that we're not able to track those sorts of assets down to the product level. I'd like to see support for contract line items included in the next release.

I've been using this solution for two years. 

My understanding is that the stability is excellent. 

The initial setup is complex because it's not meeting our needs. We're having to build a scoped app to address the inability to save contract line items and data.

For now, I rate this solution five out of 10. 

Some of the valuable features I have found the solution to have are it can serve many different types of businesses, it has strong platform capabilities, provides application development, built-in predictive intelligence, and performance analytics reports.

I have been using the solution for six years.

The stability of the solution is very good.

We have customers using the solution in medium to enterprise-sized businesses. The solution is not meant for small-sized businesses.

The technical support we have experienced was excellent.

The initial setup is really easy. Having a complex environment could add to the installation time but typically the solution can be up and fully operational in six to eight weeks' time.

The solution is priced for medium to enterprises sized businesses. However, it is expensive compared to competitors. Small businesses would have a hard to justify the price, it would not be cost-effective for them.

Those wanting to automate all of your internal functional departments under one system platform I would advise before implementing this solution to train and educate your teams on the use of these types of solutions first. This will allow for an easier transition.

I rate ServiceNow an eight out of ten.

We use it for ITSM and ITBM.

The area where we have benefited a lot is that, initially, it was very difficult to have end-to-end visibility into what was happening. We didn't have any kind of top-down or bottom-up approach to CMDB and ITSM processes across it. We were able to establish that with ServiceNow. Our other ITSM models are pretty dependent on CMDB elements, so that gives an overall picture of what is happening and where it is happening.

• Request module
• Orchestration
• The PPM Module is pretty important in our organization

The workflow is something we use on a day-to-day basis. It's pretty handy the way it is in ServiceNow. 

As our ServiceNow implementation focuses on Healthcare domain which is highly regulated , Hence we are unable to follow the full agile way to develop/implement application enhancement or new requirements , Hence we follow a hybrid delivery model where  we have integrated following servicenow modules Demand-Requirement-agile Developement- Test Management -Defect Management- Change Managementto bring our releases/changes in a regular basis , enables us to practice CIP & also helps us in having an end to end tracebility.

Also, in the Service Portal, use of Angular JS gives a very good look & feel & a lot can be done with OOB widgets - By modifying existing widget which is pretty simple, We can leverage a lot on top of it. 

Finally, I also like the architecture for collaborating between business logic and client interaction on our client interfaces.

For healthcare, which is a pretty audited environment, there are no concrete solutions for digital signatures, apart from our license with Adobe, so it requires orchestration. That is one area for improvement.

Apart from that, initially, we struggled with financial forecasting and financial management in the PPM module. That needs improvement along with the IntegrationHub which came out in a recent release. It's still in its initial stages. That could grow into a more solid solution that could be more helpful.

It's pretty much a stable product.

It has good scalability.

There is a version upgrade every year, which ServiceNnow pushes, so it remains pretty scalable if you remain pretty close to out-of-the-box. It becomes less scalable if you go in a direction where you want to use ServiceNow as the platform and build your own solution with complex logic behind it. Then, that's an issue.

I would rate the support they provide us, at above three out of five. If they do not come up with a solution or our request is out of the scope of their support, they do help us with a direction for how to get it done.

To start with, we wanted a global planning platform for all our ITSM activity, throughout the business, for internal IT. That's the reason we started migrating ITSM from different groups to ServiceNow. We did some homework on that, such as what was the market position of ServiceNow and how we could integrate with other third-party applications. After doing that analysis we came up with the ServiceNow as our option.

The setup, on a technical basis, was not that difficult. But if I want to involve different businesses into using change management, it becomes a challenge to understand the process and implement it on a platform which is standard for everyone. So it's not really the technical aspect, it's more the procedural aspect.

It took us about eight months to roll out ITSM. But after that, we have had other instances where we use a custom solution, out-of-scope applications for our customer service area, and we were able to implement it within three months.

Initially, the deployment was done by a solution partner and, to be honest, they came up with some functions that activated a lot of things which were not needed. But at that moment, it was very necessary for us to quickly jump into the ITSM module and make it available for everyone.

Later on, we realized that there were many things implemented which were not needed. Many approaches were customized but were not required. For example, Incidents is the table where we are currently doing requests, and that was introduced by the solution partner. But when we involved request-management with Incidents, we somehow missed out on a lot of process automation. There is a powerful workflow with this solution and you can do a lot of process automation, depending on different services. 

We looked at 

• BMC Remedy vs ServiceNow
• Micro Focus Service Manager vs ServiceNow
• JIRA vs ServiceNow
• and Cherwell vs ServiceNow.

You can get the most out of ServiceNow if you align your processes more towards the out-of-the-box solution, and not over-customize it to create a solution.

We have 3,000 users hosted on it but not everyone has write-access to the system. There are users who are end users who get Portal access to manage their tasks. Apart from that, there are a few fulfillers who are using the write-access: the support staff, such as the change manager or change coordinator. And then we have admins.

In terms of extent of use, currently, we have more than one instance of ServiceNow. We have three different instances for three different areas, and they have their own sets of uses.

Maintenance is mostly outsourced to a vendor who provides elemental and entry support. We are keeping more of the architectural and solution-designing work in-house.

I would rate ServiceNow at eight out of ten. It could be a ten if we had a more central way of connecting ServiceNow with different systems. They have taken initiative with the IntegrationHub and I'm really looking forward to that. Also, virtual assistance is something that has started, but we have so many requirements regarding intelligent agents being integrated with it. I'm looking forward to that. If ServiceNow rolled those solutions into it, it would enhance our end-user experience and I could probably rate it a ten.

We are consultants. We use ServiceNow to develop ideas and solutions for our customers.

It has definitely improved operations at the customer end. There are some key metrics which users have wanted and they are able to achieve them through ServiceNow solutions.

The main feature would be ITSM, as ServiceNow initially started with ITSM software. That is something which is important for all our customers. HR Case Management and Customer Service Management are two of the key areas which clients are also using.

HR Service Management is one module that needs a lot of improvement because it's a pretty new module. It was introduced in the last two years. It's becoming more mature day by day, but there is a lot of scope for improvement in that module.

The stability is really good. As I mentioned earlier, the HR area has a lot of room for improvement in terms of stability. We are trying to customize a lot of things. But overall, in terms of being a stable solution, that is what comes from ServiceNow.

I would rate scalability very high, compared to competitive tools. It is highly scalable.

If we implement it for large enterprises they could have 10,000-plus end users. We have implemented it for small organizations as well, where they have just 1,000 end users.

Out of ten, I would rate technical support at seven. Sometimes, it seems to me that even though we are looking for a simple solution, if something has to be customized, ServiceNow technical support doesn't look at it and they simply say that we have to go with Professional Services. They won't look at any custom script or any custom implementation. Where we have done a small customization to something out-of-the-box, even in those cases there are times when ServiceNow is not able to support us.

Before ServiceNow, I had worked with BMC Remedy and worked with and compared Micro Focus Service Manager vs ServiceNow. We switched our services because ServiceNow is really easy to configure and it's a cloud tool. In terms of the performance and the implementation, it is really easy to configure.

From an initial setup perspective, it is very simple. That is why ServiceNow is the market trend, compared to Remedy or compared to HPE tools. It has already captured close to 60 or 70 percent of the market. The initial setup is really very user-friendly and very easy to set up in customer environments. Just drag and drop. You really don't need any technical skillset to deploy ServiceNow at customer sites.

Deployment time depends on what a customer is trying to implement, for example, the number of modules. If a customer is going with the basic ITSM module, it does not take more than two to three months to implement that complete ITSM suite.

In terms of implementation strategy, first we try to go with the out-of-the-box features and try to follow ServiceNow guided setups, which are available on the ServiceNow Wiki. A lot of information is there. We can blindly follow that for the initial setup and for the configuration.

The staff required for deployment and maintenance depend on the customer's requirements. If the requirements are really complex and they want a custom solution, then the timelines and the staff increase, based on that. There's no standard staffing, as such, in terms of implementation. It completely depends on the complexity of the requirements and, obviously, the size of the requirements.

Initially, the licensing model ServiceNow came up with was very good. But now, from a licensing perspective, they are changing their model day by day. It is becoming a bit expensive for customers.

The licensing is changing drastically. Especially for the Orchestration piece and the HR piece, the pricing is pretty high. Initially, when ServiceNow started, the licensing was very nominal and that's why customers adopted the tool. But now, in terms of replacing other tools with ServiceNow, they could probably work on the licensing part. Doing so will obviously increase the ServiceNow market and customers will start using it for that.

We directly migrated from Remedy to ServiceNow because of the growing market for ServiceNow vs Remedy. We got quite good feedback from some of our competitors and customers that ServiceNow is really good in terms of its integrations. In 2011 we called ServiceNow to demo the product. They came to our organization and we had the demo and we really liked the tool. Then we switched over to ServiceNow.

The configuration is very simple. I would definitely recommend it from a maintenance perspective and from a scalability perspective. It is a really good tool. You can replace your existing Remedy or HPSM with ServiceNow.

Regarding how extensively the solution is being used, it's no longer just an ITSM product. It's a platform, as such. Customers have started moving all their custom applications - in addition to ITSM, their non-ITSM - to the product. They've started building everything on ServiceNow. Slowly, customers are liking the tool and they are very happy to move everything onto ServiceNow.

I rate ServiceNow at eight out of ten. For the two missing points, as I mentioned, there are some new modules which need a lot of improvement. The HR Service Management is not very straightforward right now, in terms of the security rules. We have to spend a lot of time implementing the HR module. It is not really simple the way it is with the ITSM modules.

We primarily use this for our North America practice of IT Asset Management and IT Service Management (incident, problem, change, and knowledge). We also use it for HR Case Management and are now developing business applications in order to perform things like IP and Application Management.

I like the ease of use of the ServiceNow platform. 

We have used ServiceNow for HR case management, IT Asset Management, IT Service Management, and custom business applications

The value of features has changed with each release. Initially I was impressed with the automation capability. Now, the look and feel is a valuable benefit for adoption. The most recent addition of SAM Premium is a game changer for many organizations.

I would like to see Advanced Intelligent Automation. I can't wait to see how ServiceNow continues to build out the automation capability with things like RPA, OCR, and even machine learning capabilities to help make giant steps forward in the ITSM space.

The workflow capability for easy setup is powerful. Combine this with automation and you have a great tool which is built on ITSM principles.

ServiceNow's out-of-box process configurations and service-based CMDB data model have revolutionized IT Service Management transformations. Leveraging out-of-box configurations and using frequent small-scope improvement releases (DevOps) has proven to be an effective approach for ensuring timely, lasting improvements to the core service management process.

The traditional ITIL "gather all process requirements 1st" approach to tool design never worked well. In fact, organizations attempting this "Define all Process Requirements" approach would frequently customize the tool to be similar to the process/tool that they were replacing rather than adopting the proven ITSM best practices embedded in ServiceNow. This approach extends the time to value by limiting the focus on ensuring the critical process integration points that drive rapid quantifiable process improvements.

With the right expert guidance facilitating the effectiveness of a strong executive sponsor to ensure the successful adoption of a true service-based culture, a SeviceNow implementation can drive quantifiable process improvements in three to six months in core processes, such as Incident, Problem, Change, Release, Knowledge, Asset and CFG management.

With these core processes integrated and effectively automated, an IT organization is able to transform infrastructure monitoring activities into a true service-based and proactive Event Management capability. This in-turn drives rapid and sustained improvements to service Availability, Capacity, and Demand management processes. Quantifiable service levels may then be negotiated and aligned to meet actual business process requirements.

Bottom line: ServiceNow has shattered the "Five years to a successful Service Management transformation" limitation. With the prerequisite guidance and sponsorship, measurable, and sustainable service level improvements, cost efficiencies can be achieved in 12 months or less!

Note:

1. The importance of acquiring qualified an ITSM expert and their guidance can not be overemphasized. This is preferably to someone outside the current organizational culture.
2. The need for a skilled and charismatic executive sponsor is a proven success-critical requirement for rapid sustained improvements. The right leader will recognize the need for a compelling vision and formal sponsorship strategy for the entire IT leadership team, which they will be accountable for, will ensure the culture change from the traditional siloed infrastructure, and component management focused and heroic effort based culture to a true customer focused and service based culture.

A three phase IT Service Management transformation project resulted in achieving a first year target of less than 4% sustained monthly improvements in true customer experienced availability (based on Incident MTTR metrics) for three key IT Services (three business process automation solutions with formal SLAs). Results obtained were within six months of the project start date.

• Phase 1: Formal process 'maturity' assessments and detailed recommendations. Service Mgmt. Org. restructure with dedicated Process Owners and Service Mgrs. aligned with newly defined IT services (business process related Services). Vision and Sponsorship workshops for IT leadership team resulting in formal Sponsorship Strategy and communications plan.
• Phase 2: Rapid Process Design/Improvement workshops with process owners for Incident, Problem, Change, Release, CFG (ServiceNow PM), and Knowledge Mgmt. designing "to-be" process documents, and integrated, coordinated three month implementation plans. Tool design and implementation plan documented.
• Phase 3: After three month implementation of Phase 2 processes, Rapid Process Design workshops started for Availability, Service Level, Capacity, Demand, and Event management processes. Process documents with detailed process integrations and tool/CMDB requirements spanning all 11 processes. Formal implementation plan deliverables. Coordinated implementation projects initiated.

Primary areas of inefficiencies and delays were related to change resistance and lack of support from the IT Team Lead and IT Manager level staff for involvement in ServiceNow design and training workshops, and lack of support for governing new process policies.

Bottom line issue: Not agreeing in strategy workshops for the recommendation to base performance measures for all IT staff and bonus potential for IT leadership staff on the key process maturity improvement metric targets.

This basic three phase, rapid process design workshop methodology, using an out-of-the-box solution, then the weekly ServiceNow release schedule approach to evolve process designs, has proven successful in meeting target maturity improvement metrics in all cases

Deployment issues were very rare in all projects that had a dedicated ServiceNow Development lead (with a team of Dev and DB skilled staff assigned to the project) involved as a team member with the combined process owners in Rapid Process Design workshops. These workshops involve more than five process owners designing each other's new processes, based on ServiceNow out-of-the-box requirements, guided by the Dev lead and the ITSM expert facilitator (a seasoned facilitator with ITIL Expert certification and ServiceNow bootcamp credentials is recommended).

This approach ensures all process owners and the tool design expert understand the complex integration points between all processes; a key to CMDB relationship requirements insight.

As the tool is SaaS and customization is minimized in the critical early design phase by the Process Workshop's "out-of-the-box" approach, stability and scalability are optimized.

It is excellent, always. This tool and the ServiceNow organization is a class act.

It is excellent, in all cases.

Have experience with BMac software, HPE, IBM and other leading ITSM tools.

ServiceNow has nailed the basic ITIL process integration requirements and the CMDB model is service-based out-of-the-box.

This approach using out-of-the-box and frequent small revisions only works with ServiceNow's quality underpinning best practice framework.

Expert vendor facilitator.

One of the things that I've only recently learnt is how flexible it is and how much you can do with it that I wouldn't have thought of. I've only been using ServiceNow for a short time, so it's been great to learn about all the different stuff you can do with it. So definitely consolidating everything and just putting a nice visual interface and a nice visual experience to all the data and information.

Having quick easy access to information is crucial in any business but especially in the medical field. Real-time information that's it easy to understand is critical. In some cases, it could mean life or death for our patients, so just having that readily available and digestible and easy to interpret is critical. We have customized so much, so I think that might have contributed to the learning curve for me, just figuring out where the organization had put things and what terminology they use and where to look for certain things.

In the time that I've been using it, it's been a pretty great experience.

I haven't noticed any major issues. Again, I've only been there for a short period of time.

The entire time I've been here we've been using ServiceNow.

We have customized so much, so I think that might have contributed to the learning curve for me, just figuring out where the organization had put things and what terminology they use and where to look for certain things.

I'd definitely recommend that you take a look and figure out what their needs are really. What are their goals, why are they looking at ServiceNow in the first place, and just go in there and take a look and get a demo or something and just jump in and give it a look.

It's pretty great, especially being at Knowledge 16 where I saw all the different possibilities and all the different things you can do. I'm really excited to take that knowledge and get back to do more cool stuff with it. I'd say coming in I maybe would've said 7/10, but coming out of the event I'd say it's definitely a great product.