ServiceNow Reviews

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.

How configurable ServiceNow is, but at the same time you have to know what you're doing. It's not easy to make mistakes, but at the same time I guess it is. It's kind of difficult to explain.

Right now the way we have our structure is that we use record producers that go to a form, and we use the variable editor to show the record producer. One of the limitations is if you do UI policies and client scripts on the record producer, it doesn't transfer over to the variable editor, so it's kind of like you're doing double the work. If you use the requested item table, you don't have to do double that work, which seems like a limitation that you can't use that functionality on any other table besides the requested item table. That's a big one that bothers me.

I've used it for a little less than a year.

From what I heard we've had contractors who've come in who've worked on other people's incidences, and they say our incidence is the buggiest of all the other incidences they've dealt with. When we promote update sets some of the updates in the update set don't go to the next environment. It's completely random, and it shows up in the update set in the environment you push it to that it was promoted properly, but it doesn't show up. You have to go into that environment and make the changes. Little things like that, but it's always up and running, unless our company has an internet issue.

We're using it in one of our divisions, but cross functionally, so we see it scaling up.

Ninety percent of the time the people that respond to the high tickets that we open are really knowledgeable and solve our questions within a week. In the high ticket when you select a category, there's not enough categories, so sometimes we just have to select one. In that instance, we sometimes get somebody who doesn't really understand what are questions was, because we weren't able to select a great category for them to understood what was going on.

Go for it, but start in a small area, and don't bite off more than you can chew, because it does take time to develop this stuff. It's not as easy as everybody thinks, so I wouldn't make too many promises that you're going to get stuff out there quick.

We use the solution primarily for IT Operations Management, SLA and ordinary day-to-day operations. We also use it for business dashboards and different groups within the company.

I like the solution very much. The majority of customers use it. It is one of the best, the most apt solution the industry has to offer. It is stable, scalable and easy to use. 

The total ITSM package offers availability, performance and scalability. 

I think the tool has matured sufficiently over the past six years that I do not see room for improvement. It comes with in-built capabilities and it is up to us to use it as we see fit. I would say it meets nearly every use case of ours. 

While we consider the solution to be fine, a weakness of it is that it is not on-premises. 

Security and privacy issues should be addressed in respect of the IT operations data and data storage. They should not be on a shared infrastructure, but on the SaaS in isolated storage. The solution should offer better security when it comes to storing data. 

We have been using ServiceNow for quite some time, perhaps as long as six years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

I have encountered no issues with the technical support or its response time. I have found its response time to be prompt. 

The entire installation process is easy and very straightforward, which consists primarily of the installation of the tool and its configuration. We are talking about SaaS, software as a service installation, meaning one which is ready for use. As such, there is no real installation work involved. 

The installation period lasts from two to several weeks. A medium enterprise would have a two week installation period and a large one would have a month. 

Although I am not directly involved in the team staffing purposes relating to the installation, I would estimate that it would not involve more than five or six specialists. 

The license involves a multi-year contract. While the option exists to pay for a monthly license, we are dealing with large enterprises and these typically involve multi-year licenses of ten or five years, at a minimum. 

As systems integrators, we deploy the solution both on-premises and on the cloud, although it is mostly cloud-based. While we handle both on-premises and SaaS deployment, I am only addressing the aspects involving the latter. 

Globally, we manage in excess of 250 customers. We have a shared services model which serves more than one hundred customers. 

I do not feel it would be beneficial to explore other options beyond ServiceNow. 

I rate ServiceNow as an eight out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for service desk requests, in order to track service desk requests and to know who's asking what and track these requests.

You can scale the solution.

The product has very good stability.

It could be easier to use. It's a bit complicated and the user experience isn't exactly easy.

It's too complicated and there are too many options. 

I've been using the solution for two or three years or so. 

In my experience, the solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. I find it to be reliable. 

It's my understanding that the solution scales well.

We have about 100 users on the solution currently.

I've never used technical support in the past. There never was a need to reach out. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are, however, as I have no direct experience with them.

I also have experience with Jira.

I didn't really get involved in the initial installation. It's my understanding that there really isn't one. In my experience, there's just a simple link that you click on and you're all set.

I don't have any information about the licensing process or costs. It's not an aspect of the solution I deal with. I'm not in charge of it.

I've compared this solution to Jira in the past and I find them both to be complex in terms of the user experience. 

That said, I haven't evaluated anything to replace this product at this company. 

I'm not sure if we're using an on-premises or cloud deployment. 

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. 

At this point, I'm not sure if I would recommend the solution at I don't have enough personal experience with it.

I'd rate the solution at a six out of ten. 

This solution is used for ticketing, reporting, and changes as well as for operations and incident handling. We always use one version prior to the latest one within the environment.

It provides us visibility into how we're responding to business needs. If somebody requests a new user account, a new computer, or something else, there are SLAs that have been agreed upon between different departments and business organizations. We can run weekly and monthly reports to get visibility into how we're responding to business needs.

It enables us to meet SLAs, track issues across the environment, and report those issues.

The level of complexity and the level of discovery are the two areas that can be improved. Its UI needs to evolve. They focus a lot on cool colors and other little things, which don't bring value in terms of functionality. They need to focus less on presentation and more on the functionality within the UI.

Its discovery mechanism should be improved. There is a component in ServiceNow that discovers the assets, but it doesn't do an immediate discovery, and there is a lag. If I want to open a ticket for a laptop or an asset, that asset needs to exist within ServiceNow for me to be able to say that I need to have its disk space or memory increased. It is referred to as a CI or configuration item in ServiceNow. Sometimes, ServiceNow doesn't discover these items, and as a result, I cannot open a ticket and tag that system or asset. If a system was introduced to the environment last week and it is still not listed, it becomes a problem. I will either have to wait or manually enter that system or asset. So, if I have a laptop with only 8 GB of memory and I want to request 16 GB of memory, I won't be able to do that in ServiceNow because my system or asset hasn't been discovered yet. Discovery is not immediate, and there is a lag. 

I have been using this solution for around four years.

It is a stable solution.

We're a small company with less than 10,000 endpoints. I would be able to tell you about scalability only if we had more endpoints, such as over 100,000. Currently, its usage is 100% because everybody is using the tool. On a daily basis, we have less than three percent usage, which would be 300 use cases on daily basis.

They are awesome and great. I wrote the API bidirectional connector from Splunk to ServiceNow, and I've worked with them, and they are awesome.

I have been with this company for four years. When I came into the company, this solution was already in place.

I was not here when implementation was done, so I can't provide information about the challenges that had to be overcome when the solution was implemented, but I do know that it was implemented by a third party called Accudata. We did not implement it in-house. It was a managed service initially.

I would advise having a close relationship with the people who are implementing it and staying on top of it. You should meet every day to address any problems that are encountered. 

I would rate ServiceNow an eight out of ten.

Our use case is around the core idle processes in general. We use it as a service management capability for managing intercom and so forth.

Primarily, we use it for incident management and change across the landscape. It is the virtual repository for our incident management processes. It gives us visibility about what's happening from the change management perspective across our CABs, including our enterprise CABs.

We find it good in general. Obviously, there are areas of improvement for every capability. As they evolve more, if they keep on adding more intelligence into the capabilities, it will improve. The improvement areas are more integration across the landscape and more intelligence for the overall capability of the solution.

We've been a ServiceNow customer for around five years.

It is stable. It has been one of the more stable capabilities that we have for operations.

It is an enterprise solution. Scaling has not been an issue for us.

We have got technical account managers for our account. They are available and responsive. When we go through customary support channels, they are responsive as well. There are no issues.

We did use a different solution, and there were a couple of reasons why we went through the transformation. One of them was to have enhanced capability and being able to do more with singular capability versus multiple capabilities. This was the primary reason for the switch.

For the most part, it was straightforward. We were doing a bit of a transition, transformation, and concept. We were transitioning from one capability to another, and we had all those at the right touchpoints from an integration perspective. Overall, it was relatively stable and smooth.

The major thing is to stay close to out of the box and limit those customizations. This would be the bit that I would share with others.

I would rate ServiceNow a seven out of ten.