ServiceNow Reviews

My primary use case of this solution is for tickets.

ServiceNow has helped us a lot because it helps us track our tickets, and rather than having to take notes of changes and updates, we can access all the information with a TP number.

An area for improvement would be the accessibility of downloaded and compressed files.

There are no issues with stability that I know of.

I found the initial setup to be straightforward, and it should be relatively easy for anyone to navigate it with a little help.

ServiceNow is close to perfect, it delivers exactly what is needed in terms of keeping track of information in our records. I would give it a score of eight out of ten.

The primary use case is IT service management. It encompasses quite a few things, such as incident records, change records, etc.

It uses a common base of data and allows different types of records to pull from that same base of data.

The ability to link different types of records with each other.

• The ability to embed help information onto the screens.
• The scalability needs improvement.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate stability as a seven.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate scalability as a four.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate technical support as a seven.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

The most important thing to have in place is the face of the configuration data.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Scalability
• The development model: How are updates made and promoted to production.
• Ability to embed user help information directly to the interface.
  

To me, just the initial interface is very intuitive and user-friendly and I think it's just going to be yards ahead of what we've been doing previously. Since it's so intuitive, it's easy to use. In the middle of whatever you're doing, you can drill down or build reports or save your filters. I think it's going to save us a lot of time on building and people asking other people for information when they can get it themselves.

The integration between asset management and ticketing and having it all under one roof is going to help us become more efficient.

It's really too early for me to tell because it's such a vast difference in what we have already. I haven't run into anything yet that I would say needs to be improved. Again, we're just starting.

I'm not sure if they have the software-as-a-catalogue yet, as far as bringing in the software titles with all of the rules of engagement for the software licensing. Right now, the competition has it, so the tool that we have now it makes it a lot easier on the people running the software compliance because then they're not guessing at how the licensing works. Then they had somebody in the industry telling them exactly the right thing to do without trying to figure it out for themselves and perhaps making mistakes.

Too early to tell, but not that I'm aware of. That part is not really my area, but I haven't heard of any.

I have no idea. I suspect it's great, though.

We were using CA Service Desk. The learning curve is going to be a lot shorter. The interface is much more user-friendly and, again, the integration is much better.

It's going to be pretty complex, but it's because we've got data coming from a lot of different sources. From what I've seen on the imports, ServiceNow isn't going to be reason it's going to be complex. They're going to make it a lot easier.

We've brought in a third party.

ServiceNow is such a broad framework that you can basically touch upon any improvement that you want to do in your company. Whether it's financial, healthcare or HR related. I think you can use your imagination to build anything that you want to improve. I think that's the greatest power of ServiceNow - it's basically a generic optimization too.

What I really like is that it's going a bit away from purely IT but it allows you to compose a service catalog or an asset database. That can be the basis of purchasing, request performance or validation. For example for healthcare, you load all the assets of technical healthcare systems into ACNB database which can be used to find out which hospitals have an MRI machine available.

You can go in all kinds of directions and I think that's what is most powerful. They use mechanisms to attract people to the system. I think the user experience is improving so fast, they use the example a system of record and system of engagement. I think it's exactly that. It attracts people that normally wouldn't have so much interest in a system like this but because it communicates a bit like WhatsApp it appeals much more to what they like to do. Then I think the biggest step of implementing such things is not the imagination of knowing what to design, what to develop but how to implement it in an organization. I think that's the biggest step, basically changing your organization to adapt to the new functionality or the new way of working you want to introduce. I think that for companies it's the most difficult aspect.

Architects and solution designers can come up with the greatest things but more complex organizations cannot just be blended into an ideal model. There's always contradicting stakeholders especially in the field of service management. I'm doing an assignment with a large bank and their service management belongs the service management department. The IT company that does the nominal incident resolution for us feel responsible for service management. We have a security and compliance department who feels responsible for service management. We have a functional support department that feels responsible for service management. Everybody has an opinion on service management, everybody has an opinion on CMDB. If you want to change something with a great idea, they have to get all those people on board to get the decision made and then to have it implemented. I think that is the tricky bit and that's what you don't hear all the time.

Well the funny thing is that we develop based on ServiceNow and you see a lot of apps being made. I think whenever you see shortfalls or improvement opportunities for ServiceNow that are being built by third party companies, the next release of ServiceNow includes it all. There must be aspects that are currently not there in ServiceNow and my bet is that it will be there next year. That's difficult for development guys like us but on the other hand it makes the product stronger all the time.

What I'd like to see is the fact that Performance Analytics should be a stand-alone reporting tool, and allow you to drag and drop within the data cubes or the dimensions in the data model. Let's say I want this on the y-axis and I want this on the x or I want this in this in this kind of graph. You can throw around with the fields and immediately you see the graphs being populated. I think from a customer point of view, they should be able to be in the power to have their idea created right there on the spot and not being dependent on an implementer who comes and does this consulting for them. I saw good examples in BMC which I haven't seen on Performance Analytics but they just bought the products, they're just expanding on that. What I see is that companies sometimes use an external tool for presenting dashboards to customers, like Numerify or Grafana or this 3rd-party dashboarding solutions. I think it's a waste if ServiceNow is not able to keep those customers on-board.

I think ServiceNow can improve more towards the customer to allow them to do that themselves. If they implemented some frameworking, set it up for you and then say, "Okay, this is what you can do and this is the freedom you'll get." Then you can throw or you can toss around with the data in any way you would like.

On the platform, on the framework called ServiceNow there's all kinds of interacting systems like SAP and Oracle. I think what you see is that maybe SAP will not be needed that much anymore in five years from now because a lot of functionality that a company needs is offered through the platform called ServiceNow.

I don't know where that's going to end because at some point ServiceNow will become a marlock and people will turn away from a 'one solution fits all' and go more into the niches again. I don't know where it's going to end. Until now I think it looks very promising and yeah, I think very much appealing to most customers.

We have used it only for a couple of months because we're a start-up. Personally, I've used it a little over a year.

One of our partners is the technical guy, he's developing now on the development instance.

The only thing I can come up with is the fact that we ordered an instance with domain separation or activated that wasn't there from the scratch. We had to raise an incidence and to get it resolved and stuff. You know that it takes you one or two weeks and then everything is done and then it's passed to you.

We used a solution from HP.

Out-of-the-box stuff is very easy to deploy but when you have specific demands then maybe of course it is more complex. For us it was quite easy because we had a developer instance already so we developed most of our products in that instance. We couldn't get stuff like the domain separation completely functionally the way we wanted it. We could develop already, so when we purchased our instance I think it took us 2 - 3 weeks to get everything up and running.

I would definitely advise you to transition into ServiceNow because I've seen comparisons with the BMC Projects which is a lot more expensive. I haven't seen any functionality that I would really like except maybe for some Performance Analytics functionality that is more user friendly than what I saw.

We primarily use it for change management and incidents. We get the greatest value from our change management. We recently moved to ServiceNow from HP Service Manager about two years ago and it's been leaps and bounds just better than what we had before. We're able to do our approvals, automated approvals through email, through other means, and it's just made everything so much more smooth.

We found because we're working on an internal cloud solution right now, we found that being able to integrate with other solutions it's been so great because we're able to use the APIs and web service calls to integrate with SCCM, Microsoft's orchestration tool and we're just been able to find that it's so versatile in working with other products and it's made everything so much easy.

The only complaint that I would have is just the interface itself is not always user friendly. We get some complaints from users that they don't know exactly what all the features, all the fields mean, and what they're used for. I guess I want it to be  a little more user friendly.

I wasn't really involved in the installation of it. I'm more on the admin side so I can't really speak to that.

We do our maintenance updates about once a month but we haven't really had any downtime at all since we've put it in place. We recently went through an upgrade about a month ago, a couple of months ago, and there was no issue, there were no issues at all.

We haven't really had to do that yet because it's fairly new in our environment we haven't really had to scale it yet. We're basically using the same infrastructure that we put in initially.

Upgrades are fairly easy. Like I said, we don't have any real issue when it comes to updates and maintenance and things like that. I would say we haven't really had any major downtime incidents since we've had it in place.

I think getting your support team involved early on so that they understand how the process is going to change from whatever they're currently using is a big key. We had some growing pains initially going from one system to the other, but getting the support team involved early on in the process would be very beneficial to anyone that's moving forward with ServiceNow.

It acts as a one-stop shop for customers to be able to go in and create instant problem tickets if the incident is severity one or two. But basically, it's a one-stop shop because beforehand we were using multiple ticketing systems, mainly by email. So now instead of having that we just have them go in, log a ticket, and then its assigned to whatever group and whatever the group it's assigned to goes ahead and takes care of it.

We were doing our user on-boarding via email, and it involved a lot of emails going back and forth. Now, it's just a ticket. Our security team gets provisioning tasks. You can log an instance, use a service catalog, we have provisioning. It's just as important for them to go to one place. On a macro level it helps us do things more efficiently.

I can't wait until we get to Helsinki and such. There are some cool things that I have seen. Portal. The drag and drops which we currently don't have with Fuji.

We've been using it for three years, and we're currently on Fuji patch 3. I'm in the process of fixing our patching problems because there were some issues. Once I get it done, I will go ahead and bump us up to Fuji, patch 12 or so. Then we have a project where we are going to simplify our system, and we have a lot of customization so we are going to kind of try to go back out of the box.

They wanted a ticket to where the customer would see a general global ticket and not have to go through and see if it was an incident or a general request or whatever. And this one particular ticket and the way they have it set up is fairly complicated. They didn't use global tables that should have been used, they customized it and now we are having issues. So we are going to try to get it back to where it is a more simple thing and this should make it more stable.

The system admin. We have another guy that's our business analyst. But we have around 20,000 people in the company. Its global, so everyone is using it well we hope everyone is using it. We've added the catalog, we've made it global within the last year. So we have North America, Australia, Northern Europe and Central Europe. And we're hoping our European people are using it as well as Australia. But there used to be a lot of emails and stuff bouncing back and forth rather than using catalog.

We were using ChangeGear which was kind of limiting. We're a global company now. I don't know, I wasn't in on the why we changed but I know that we were using ChangeGear now before Service Now and it just wasn't suited to our needs.

I think that the way they set up global ticket there was a lot of development, so fairly complex. If they had not done all the customizations, it would have been a lot better, a lot easier and more straightforward.

I would recommend it. I would recommend not doing a lot of client scripts. Not doing a lot of customization. Stick with the out of the box, it's easier to upgrade, easier to implement. The people who are behind the scenes like I am need to go and find things in the Wiki. It's much easier to find, to fix that type of thing.

I've really enjoyed working with it, and I guess it's just the way we have things set up. It's a little frustrating not being able to find things, all the stuff I have to go through to get things fixed.

• Flexibility to do what I need to do. 
• The ability to automate what processes need to be automated. 
• Makes it easier for my users to be able to do things. 
• By coding you can go in and change it to whatever you want to do. You make it yours. Whereas, I've used some systems that you get it and that's it.

It gives our users the ability to do things they weren't doing before. We can get rid of several other systems, replace it with ServiceNow. I don't know exact dollar amounts for what they replaced with ServiceNow, but it's more than what I make.

Some of the issues that my team has run into are that something one day works completely fine, the next day it does not. If we release a patch, something happens, and it was working fine now. No recollection in any documentation anywhere about changing, but it doesn't work now. It's always something ServiceNow has changed, but neglected to tell anybody of the change. There's a lot of processes that were working when ServiceNow was implemented but aren't really as beneficial now.

I've been using for four years, and are currently on Fuji Patch 10 in the process of upgrading to Patch 12. Then we're looking at two different things right now. We may go to Geneva, but there's also talk of completely redoing ServiceNow and going straight to Helsinki. We might just redo the entire instance, skip Geneva and start with Helsinki.

There were no issues with the deployment.

Every clone release has been pretty seamless. We had one issue with one patch, but that was due to IE issues. It wasn't compatible before IE9 and some of our users were still on IE8, though they weren't supposed to be.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

The last thing I used before ServiceNow was HPE Service Desk and Remedy. Those are the only two other ones I've really used. I've seen other ones demoed and stuff, but they were not as flexible. I guess I've used SAP too.

I currently go to school too, which is at NKU in northern Kentucky and they use a SAP type product. I can't remember what it's called, but it's just not very functional.

I was not part of my current company's implementation, but with a previous one and their parent company, I was part of their implementations and it was pretty seamless, other than political issues.

Try to do as much as you can out of the box. Use as much out of box parts of it as you can. Development does come in handy, makes it scalable, and makes it more usable, but use as much out of the box as you can. That's the best advice I can give you.

The best thing is that when you patch and something's working one day, you patch and it's not working the next after you've tested and tested and tested and it's not working. Also, there's the fact that there are things that are changed that people are not notified about.

I mostly use it for change management.

Change management is most valuable.

The interface can be a bit more intuitive.

It has been in the company for quite a while. It's not new at all. 

I've been using it on and off for about eight or nine years. I work with this solution on almost a daily basis at this point, at least three times a week.

I find it to be very stable.

I'm not in a good position to give a judgment on its scalability, but in terms of its usage, because it is a ticketing system, it is used for all the incidents. Our service desk uses it primarily to issue tickets, requests, changes, and so on. There are about 15 people who use it very regularly for those types of purposes. It is being used extensively.

I never had to get in touch with their technical support.

I wasn't here when it came online.

I would rate it a seven out of 10.