ServiceNow Reviews

I'm a consultant, so I primarily work on projects implementing Service Now inside of different organizations.

The biggest improvement I see is that unstructured work, which would primarily be worked on within spreadsheets or within emails, is able to be centralized, managed end-to-end, and have that visibility and structure in ServiceNow. That provides enormous productivity gains. 

In addition, it provides the ability to meet internal IT assurance around audit trails.

Finally, the improved visibility helps in decision-making for senior leaders and executives.

One feature of ServiceNow that is important is the workflow engine. From my perspective, the power to be able to structure processes, represent workforce management for organizations, and the visibility provided by the reporting are additional top features.

ServiceNow is divided up into a lot of modules, so I'll give an example, instead of going into every single module.

For me, there's a real opportunity, especially within the IT Service Management suite, to give a much better overall view of the workflow that individuals have across the different applications. At the moment, a lot of information is quite siloed in the different tables in ServiceNow. There is a real opportunity to present, in a centralized way, some form of universal work list, to give better ideas around demand and supply of resources, and then help prioritize that work.

The only other thing that I'd say about ServiceNow, in general, is commercially related around licensing, and it's a big inhibitor for a lot of our customers, especially those who are innovators on the platform. I've got a couple of really good example clients where they are limited in what they can do with the product. If they were to do what they wanted to do, the licensing that would come about, from a platform runtime licensing perspective, would mean it wouldn't have the same value proposition.

An improvement area, to summarize, would be better licensing for when clients are trying to be innovative on the platform.

The stability of ServiceNow is excellent. I've never had any issues around its stability, scalability, availability, or any of those metrics.

ServiceNow technical support has always been excellent. They are quick to respond, they have good, strong technical capabilities, they're good at communicating and getting in touch with you.

I have used BMC Remedy previously and the primary reason for switching to ServiceNow was around the fact that ServiceNow is cloud-based, scalable, and easily configurable.

Overall, the setup is fairly simple. You have to have a point of reference to compare it to. If I think about other cloud-based tools that I've worked with, by comparison, I would say it is most definitely simple.

Myself, being a consultant and implementing ServiceNow multiple times over in different organizations, an average implementation, which would result in a minimum viable product - standing up ServiceNow to achieve some form of business value - would be 12 weeks.

I typically see a 12-week implementation of ServiceNow achieved with approximately six individuals for the deployment. Ongoing maintenance of ServiceNow will typically involve the equivalent of four FTEs.

I don't have any data points at the moment, but I know some of our clients have articulated ROI as part of the benefits they have realized. The ROI is definitely positive for clients that we've worked for.

ServiceNow pricing is an art, not a science. The deal depends on how commercially savvy you are, which does make it something that is quite difficult to get right. It is most definitely an opportunity area for ServiceNow to improve and have more visibility around pricing of the different products within the platform.

Other options would be BMC Remedy and Cherwell, from an ITSM perspective. For HRSM, alternative solutions are Workday and SuccessFactors.

My advice would be to engage with an implementation partner that has good experience and definitely not to underestimate the organizational-change activities, like training and communication, that are required. ServiceNow shouldn't be treated as purely a technology solution. People, processes, communication, and training need to be factored in when implementing.

We've implemented ServiceNow in government organizations with up to 9,000 people, in a couple of scenarios, using it for either IT service management or HR service management, predominantly. The roles of the users varied within the government.

In terms of how extensively ServiceNow is used, every client we work with has a roadmap of additional functionality that they would like to use in ServiceNow. To generalize, there are different extents of use but each definitely has a roadmap of continuous improvement and use of more features or modules of the product.

I would rate ServiceNow a nine out of ten. Some of the points that I touched on above would make it a perfect ten: more visible and consistent licensing around the cost of licensing; better ability to innovate on the platform without incurring licensing that isn't representative of the innovation that's being created.

ServiceNow is a really great platform. What I like about it is the integration capabilities. We use this a lot with our customers, integrating different systems with their suppliers, and that saves a lot of time. Besides this, the platform opens up a lot of possibilities. We mostly use the ITIL. Instant problem change is a great feature. The customer portal is also appreciated.

For example, we had one process of the customer when they had two ticketing systems. Their own, and their supplier's system, and they used to copy the tickets by hand. A person actually typed in the stuff in the other system, back and forth. That takes so much time. Now it's all integrated. There's no time delay, and they're much more efficient now.

With the ITSM solution, you kind of have chaos. You can really tackle that with the solution. You have standardized processes and you get rid of the chaos to be more organized. When you're more organized, the company gets more efficient and you get the job done. The system's more reliable, so the quality of the service increases with an IT service management solution.

I would like an IoT integration. At the hackathon there was a team working with Amazon buttons with a battery inside. You push it, and you will trigger a request. You can put it next to a coffee maker. If there's an issue, press it. Or integrate a whole different kind of sensor with ServiceNow. You can even more automate your process and your services.

Some processes could be a bit more detailed. For example, the change process. It was reworked in Helsinki, so that's a great thing. Maybe there they could bring a bit more. Also, the incident process was reworked. I really like these changes. That would be my advice. Go again over the process.

We've been using it for five years. We're currently on Geneva, but we're planning on going with the Helsinki release soon.

The point is, when you do heavy customization, it takes some time to upgrade. But that's not ServiceNow's fault, because sometimes you need a special feature, or something implemented in a special way, and they just need to keep track of that every time you upgrade. But usually it's not that complicated, just review it. The new features in Helsinki are great when you have this nice overview. You review the feature, then you call ServiceNow, and you're done. The rest works seamlessly.

There were performance issues, minor ones, with one customer. The rest is working really good.

It was quite complex, because I'm working with service providers. They have a customer site, and a company site, so there's domain separation, where you actually separate all the data. I had to put a lot of effort on the CMDB, but now they have a great solution. The correct SLAs, they just wake the technicians at night when the customer's really paying for it. It's really pre-one incident.

The time for go live is really short. You can get it up and running in a fast time compared to other solutions. That's definitely a plus.

I think you should have your processes sorted out before you start implementing, or at least make decisions. You can always improve your process afterward. But it's good, then you have a starting motion. Otherwise, it's hard. If you're not sure about your processes, then you either stick to the standard processes, or otherwise it's hard to start implementation.

I would say everything. A customer can call the service desk and the service desk can create the incident and set the incident task to whoever it has to go to and the change is a huge process in our system. In our company, we have the change process that are properly done, so going into ServiceNow it improved the process even more. The change, changed task, and under release, are in the same module. We have a ton of catalogs items we have put in and people have been using it. We do the tasks automatically through Workflow, so it works very well.

We also did the facility module when we went with the Eureka and facilities team is using it as well. They have tremendously improved their process because they have been doing handwriting before, so switching into ServiceNow they were able to make a lot of improvement.

I think that ServiceNow needs to think about implementing an enterprise solution for licensing because it's going to become too pricey and not sustainable from a corporate perspective. We are not using HR, BPM management, or DRC. I would like to have those and talk to a company at high levels so they can see better, and they can get into those modules as well.

For ServiceNow itself, they're doing more every year, even now, they're doing Android, iPhone and Watch, so they should keep doing more things every year.

I have been using ServiceNow since August 2014.

There was an outage at the ServiceNow data center servers, especially on the eastern site. I don't know about all the other data centers, but our data center recently had an outage for at least 15 minutes. Two weeks later we found out about it through some other call, not to the engineer and it was not notified anywhere on the system. I thought ServiceNow would have send out an e-mail or put something on the page saying that the ServiceNow in the data center is out.

I would say it's nicely done and we have been using it for our other processes and integrating with other companies as well.

They are doing very well. We have two process. One from the self-service page, the self service page, you can do automatically to the incident or they can call in to the service desk and they can do that manually for them.

We were using HP Service Manager before and even before that I think we had used Heat. I don't know whether there were any other competitors or not, as this was selected by the stakeholders in our company, so I don't know what they considered.

I would recommend it and I love this tool. Anything that I think of, the tool can do. The one thing that we were looking for was HR and procurement management. They were looking for the document management and red lines. You can do the documents attached to it, but they cannot do the document itself, like a template or something I believe they are doing the that in Helsinki.

The most valuable feature by far of ServiceNow is the rapid development. How quickly you can actually go out and change things, adapt things, ready to fulfill the business needs.

One of the things that we're trying to figure out is how ServiceNow can be more of a platform to be used as a backend. Because of the rapid development, it can barely oversee it for use at the back end. We're having discussions right now to actually understand what that will mean. The other piece is some of the UI's are currently being restricted from not having too much customizations. That puts us in a tough spot. Sometimes there are some corner cases where some people want something and we kind of change it. Those are mostly with new UI's. There's good reasons for actually locking those down. At the same time, it problematic for us.

I have been using personally ServiceNow for about five years.

Best in class. It has been really good; it's availability, reliability, performance. Sometimes people do dumb stuff with scripts. The performance is not the platform's problem, the problem is with peoples scripts.

It scales well.

It's great. I'm part of the ServiceNow community, so that helps for support. Their support works great - they are really helpful, they have the indicators and all the right stuff for closing tickets really quickly and they also put first resolving your issue. It's really great support.

We used to use different solutions. Some of it was kind home-grown. Nothing similar to ServiceNow from as a platform perspective.

It's already set up, you just have to work it out according to your needs. Just like in any other project, you need to understand your process, you need to understand how you need to improve your process. Don't automate the problem. Just like any other process, the recommendation is you either work with ServiceNow or you're work with a technology partner. I'm a technology partner and we help others with those types of things. It's really straightforward.

Originally when we first rolled out, it was obviously the fact that we had full IT service management in one area. We were extremely scattered and had many different tools all over the place and none of them were integrated. That was our initial sell feature for us.

As time has gone on and ServiceNow has evolved and matured, we are loving the ease of the product. Each year, each version, each release they come out with is all that much more configurable for us. One of the biggest things for us is the fact that we've had the opportunity to be a partner with them and have had the opportunity to have some input and feedback on their product to begin with and have seen some of that that have come to fruition. In fact, I just saw a demonstration and there were several things that I know were a part of suggesting and the input that they received from their customers.

I hadn't really thought much beyond the improvements that I'm seeing that they're putting out in Helsinki. My organization is currently on the Fuji release. We were going to be upgrading to the Geneva release in July. One of the things we were coming here [to Knowledge16] specifically to look at is jumping on the release and going straight from Fuji to Helsinki. Considering some of the things that I just saw that they rolled out, I'm going to be pushing pretty hard for that.

Many of the things that we felt needed a little bit more shoring up was their CMBD product and their discovery, they seem to have covered that in the Helsinki release. I'm not really thinking of what the next step is going to be at this point. I was wowed with Helsinki, so at this point I'm looking forward to rolling that in and working with it.

We implemented it back in 2011.

I like the scalability of it. We need an instance that we will have it within 24 hours. In fact, we have several instances in the Cloud. We have our production instance, we have a test instance, and we have four development instances.

I'm not necessarily involved in the day to day support that we would have to reach out to. Our architect is more involved with that. However, I do know that I have been the contributor of a few of the bugs that have been found. They seem to be very responsive, work with our developer and our architect team and work through the issues.

When we started out, we did it in phases. Our very first phase was the change management application in a very condensed version of the incident management application. Phase two rolled out in late 2014. At that point, we went to a full incident management application. We revamped our change management application, rolled out problem service catalog, discovery, our CMDB. We have quite a few, some 38, applications that are currently turned on. They were pretty basic and we've been over the years developing and expanding those.

The most valuable parts of ServiceNow for us is the flexibility that it has, that it's a platform, and that we can develop pretty much anything that we need, not only for IT, but also for HR, our finance department, our register's office, pretty much any organization around campus. ServiceNow provides us with a platform that we can develop the tools that are necessary for just about any function on campus.

It gives us one platform that we can go in and do reporting. Reporting is probably one of the key features, it's getting access to data that we have in ServiceNow and being able to report on that is a key element in how we are analyzing and making decisions. We can quickly pull up reports, graphs, charts, whatever we need to be able to make decisions, where beforehand just to pull the data was a lot harder.

We've developed a number of apps or workflows that literally have taken days or weeks to complete because of the approval process. We've taken that into a workflow where now the approvals are sent via email. A user, or an administrator just needs to simply click on that email, click on approve, send it back. We've seen in some of those cases where, like I said, it's gone from days or weeks to literally hours and minutes. Another scenario is we've taken our employee leave system from a paper base where paper had to be filled out manually, signed, given to a staff assistant to enter into our ERP system to being done on the IT systems.

We've now taken that entire process where an employee fills it out online wherever they may be. They submit it, it routes to their supervisor for an approval. That approval comes back, and then that system is fed into our ERP system. There's no manual process to it, other than entering the leave request, selecting the days, and the number of hours you're taking, and the supervisor approving it. We estimate that university-wide, that's probably saving about 2,000 hours per year just on employees having to enter that data back into our ERP system.

Probably the biggest thing that is frustrating is the changes in their price structure, their price modeling. That's been very frustrating for us. Since we came on four years ago, it's changed quite a bit over time. There's been a lot of uncertainty on what the pricing scheme is going to be. It's worked out well for us, but that uncertainty as the company has grown, not knowing where they're going with it, has been a little frustrating.

The first real latency issue we had was about a month ago. We attributed it to probably some updates that we had run. We backed those off to see if they impacted any of that performance. We were thinking it was something we had done. Come to find out that they had transferred us from their Virginia data site to their San Jose, I believe and they had some issues. Once we recognized that it wasn't on our end, we notified them and they were quick to respond to it. That's the only real latency issue that we've had. It's always a concern. That's something that we're always very aware of is because our users are like, "If ServiceNow continues to grow, what's going to be the impact to performance?"

As we grow as an organization, meaning the number of developers we have in the system, we've had a big concern with how we give access to developers, but don't allow them to hurt the whole environment once they’re in. There again, the changes that they've introduced with Helsinki, and that being able to do more sculpt applications, and narrow the access that admins have is a huge improvement. We keep growing as far as the number of developers we have in the system, but we have major concern over what they can touch, and what they should and shouldn't touch.

Scaling, as far as what we're doing in the system, we haven't have any issue with. Scaling, as far as the number of developers and how to organize that, as far as bringing more and more people into actually develop on it, that's been our concern. The time commitment to get them up and running, speed, get them trained, especially trained in how we do things. The other part is the access that we give them, so the issue is not with the solution itself, it's more organizationally.

We had a multitude of systems. When we talked about a knowledge base, Knowledge Base was a home-grown system that we had outgrown as far as IT and the university. We ran into severe limitations with our Knowledge Base. We had old content out there. ServiceNow allowed us to restructure how we're doing knowledge, and implementing a knowledge base to the entire campus. Incident, we were using Footprints, which was eventually bought out by BMC.

It was sold two or three time in Footprints. We had used Remedy. Remedy proved to be so cumbersome to manage, as far as an incident management tool. We've gone multiple directions. ServiceNow, as far as incident management, allows us to quickly escalate issues to the proper teams. Not only across IT, but we've incorporated it in so we can escalate issues to departmental IT personnel as well, and even outside of IT where necessary.

I'm a big proponent of ServiceNow. While I think it's a great system, it's not a silver bullet. I don't think there is a silver bullet system out there for IT, or for an enterprise. I would say ServiceNow is as close, in the variety of systems that I've come across, it's as close as a system has come to meeting not only an IT need, but an organizational need. That's initially where we started. We started it at with an IT need. I would say in order for it to be successful, you have to have buy-in from the top. If your administration is buying in with it, and can show their level of support for that change, that system, it makes it go a lot easier. We had a mixture of support. Some things went well. Others, we didn't have the support, and so it was an uphill battle.

We use it for incident management and service requests.

It offers enhanced and efficient communication between the requester and the four pillar EDR through an online chat platform. It enables faster communication and turnaround time between the parties, which was previously challenging through phone conversations. The requester can check with the online representative and capture relevant information in the email for seamless communication and documentation.

Its service level management and comprehensive service catalog are very beneficial. The solution focuses on utilizing a clear network to document the service request item catalog, allowing for efficient capture of requests and prompt response. This feature improves customer experience by providing a user-friendly platform.

I would like to see further integration of the automation workflow with robotic process automation that would streamline processes and improve productivity.

I have been working with it for ten years.

The platform is developed specifically for IT service management and offers a range of enhanced features. I would rate it seven out of ten.

The scaling abilities of the solution are good. They are influenced by commercial factors and the efficiency of quickly reaching agreements for extending the platform's functionality. I would rate it six out of ten.

I am satisfied with the customer support and service provided.

Positive

The initial setup was not that complex. The main challenge in setting up the solution lies in the implementation process. There are many difficulties in adapting the workflow and approvals to align with ServiceNow's functionalities. Customer preferences and the need for customization may result in complicating the process further. Having a thorough understanding of the system is crucial for efficiently configuring the platform to meet customer requirements. I would rate it seven out of ten.

The deployment was divided into phases. The duration of one was a month and a half, and the other one was about six months. The entire deployment process took around two years by a team of approximately ten to fifteen people, including the implementers and the users.

It is not a cheap solution. I would say it is moderately expensive, ranging from six to seven on a scale of ten.

It is important to adopt the designed process for the platform rather than customizing or slowing down the platform to fit existing processes. That enables the utilization of the features effectively, including the ability to rate and provide feedback on the sweepstakes. Failure to adopt the designed process may result in difficulties with future upgrades and enhancements. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

We use ServiceNow for our internal IT and end-users. When I first started with it, I was simply a user. I've now started to manage the functionality, as well.

Very soon, we will be upgrading to the Paris version.

The most valuable features are its ease of use and capabilities.

ServiceNow is a pretty versatile product.

It is robust and very user-friendly.

I would like to see more functionality in terms of custom workflows, not impacting the overall platform health.

I have been using ServiceNow for between four and five years.

This is a really stable solution.

It is possible to scale, as needed.

I have not had direct experience with technical support, but they have been very helpful for us.

The initial setup is quite straightforward. Ours is a pretty large implementation, so it took approximately two weeks. This was due to the complexity.

This is a pretty expensive product, so the licensing could be better.

This is a product that I absolutely recommend. My advice is to use as much of the out-of-the-box functionality as possible.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.