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.

Used for the entire company (400K), like HR, service desk and other functions.

Easy to implement and consolidate different platforms and users with useful functionalities.

It has an excellent capability to integrate different access points. It is very user-friendly, too. 

It has a higher cost compared to local/regional solutions. 

Local solutions have lower costs.

I would recommend ServiceNow.

Microsoft and Oracle Software tracking and management.

• Maintains a real-time view of license position. 
• Compies with contract terms to avoid penalties and the impact that an audit can have on day-to-day activity 
• Identifies better ways to license software or eliminate unused software to save money and maintain a choice between buying more licenses or reclaiming licenses to stay within compliance. 

Oracle and Microsoft license software catalog. 

Needs additional software titles and easier normalization.

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.

• Simplicity of Change Manager
• Product based on user experience
• Nuclear integration

The ease of implementing the operational processes gives my clients the ability to streamline their day-to-day operations quickly, and allows huge visibility for managers and decision makers.

All areas.

Five years.

No.

No.

A nine out of 10.

I'm an implementer. I work with several solutions.

Very easy and simple to implement; a third of the time of other solutions.

The first impact for the customer is that it is expensive, but do not forget that it is a solution that includes infrastructure; a single cost, easy to justify.

With ServiceNow, it is difficult to recommend another solution. Only the price might be a reason to suggest other solutions. Ivanti could be a good solution.

It is the best solution in the market.

The analytics - we like to keep track of how much work everyone is doing. We need to make sure that everyone is being efficient and being utilized. At the same time, regarding hardware, we want to make sure all the hardware is being utilized.

The other valuable feature is the asset management. It is the same thing, but with hardware. We want to know how much hardware - computers and anything else that we have in stock before we actually order them. Again, it probably boils down to the cost.

We're getting a good cost-efficiency. In my line of work, we deploy between 50 to 80 computers per day, break/fix new computers, laptops, you name it, we have it. We want to keep track of whether or not we need to replace a whole laptop, or just replace a hardware component that's failing on it. At the same time, we also want to make sure that we're keeping on par with the new technology, so that way we don't get left behind.

Most people are discussing UIs, but I'm a developer. I would say 80-90% of the people would appreciate that, that's easy for them, but from a developer perspective, it's hard for me, because for me it's clunky. Just give me a spreadsheet or give me a Notepad and I can write it down. For me, I would rather have that - give me an option to do that, maybe a CLI, instead of a UI.

Earlier today we were doing things such as merging data. What happened was I tried to merge one company to another. It's the same company, it's just a misspelled name. There was a bug - that there was supposed to be an undo button, but it wasn't there. It's one of those things, but then I asked a person how to do it, and they can't figure it out.

ServiceNow is such a complex piece of software. It's trying to be everything. The way I look at it, sooner or later, it's going to fail, because it's trying to do a lot of stuff. I can't say what or where, but it will. We've seen it a lot of times already with other products. You can't be everything, and that's what they're trying to do.

We don't really use much of ServiceNow except for the ticketing system, for now, so we don't have any issues. If there's a new hire we can add them fine, and it's quick. If there is new hardware, our admin just creates a new hardware form, and it's there, so I don't see any problem with that.

From my standpoint it's easy. As long as you attend an event where they teach you how to do it, you'll pick it up right away, because before I attended one, I had no clue how ServiceNow worked. I went to one for three days and now I at least have, about 25% knowledge of how ServiceNow works. I guess if you attend an event, you'll pick it up right away.

Right now we use ServiceNow, we use SCCM, we use Case. It's three different bits of software but basically what we use them for is as a reporting tool, like I said for the analytics of how we need hardware or tickets are coming in, but ServiceNow is mostly just for tickets.

Granted there's pros and cons in being everything that it wants to be. In our experience, we have Case, we have SCCM: sure, you're generating a report in SECM, and then you're generating another report in Case, there's a slight chance that the result will be different. If you have one thing, one software that's doing everything for you, the reports and the results will be consistent. I see that it's not done yet, it's not complete yet, but in the long run I also see it coming up with a bunch of problems.

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.

For the most part, we have used prior ITSM solutions and they have been a bit more difficult to integrate and customize into the rest of the things that we do as they are standalone products. Something like ServiceNow ITSM, where there is such a good foundation within a relationship between items and some very good capabilities to extend into our existing automation, workflows and things of that nature, is something that we're definitely looking forward to.

We want to end up getting set up as part of Discovery with a type of automatic relationship. In addition, we have been looking at a means to provide a service catalog experience to the business as a whole and are looking forward to potentially implementing a service portal.

Actually, the biggest problem that I see for it, especially in a smaller organization, is that there are plenty of partners. We've got a fairly advanced IT organization. We do a lot of relatively advanced stuff for the size that we are, but ServiceNow itself is so big and to some extent, there is a significant amount of complexity that you have, a big learning curve I would say, in order to really get on board.

It doesn't mean that you can't attack it in pieces and things like that, but I think one of the problems I've had just in getting involved within the last couple of months, is trying to kind of weed out what I don't necessarily need to look at and focus on, just a specific area and trying to find best practice documentation of that matter is, has been a challenge.

In many cases, it really just doesn't exist. I mean, we know we've got the documentation and everything else, and they tell you all the things that you can do. I mean, again, it's one of these things where I think everybody likes to begin a little better, would like to begin with a template, or some kind of a best practice template given their situation if they can find it, and then, you know, kind of build from there. Because when you're starting just with a completely blank scratch pad, you just don't know where to go.

I think the thing that I've always been concerned with implementing a new product is being able to really spend a proper amount of time upfront with design and making sure I'm designing something that won't limit my choices or my abilities to use it, or will keep me from having to just go back and completely rewrite the whole thing in the future. I've not gotten that comfortability yet with the product and it's after a couple months. There's a huge learning curve with the product.

Also, we have not really had a good view of our different configuration items. 

I don't really think that we're running into too many stability issues.

The product scale's wonderful. We don't have to worry about the scalability and someplace else. Even within our organization, we're not finding really any major issues with scalability and things of that nature.

Most of what we have to just be concerned with is that we almost have too much information. It's like going from having nothing to taking a fire hose worth of information and trying to figure out, "Okay, what do we really maybe not have to pay attention to initially? What are we going to focus on?" I wouldn't say there are any issues with the product right now from the performance and scalability point of view; it's been performing very well.

Altiris is the product we're getting out of. I think there's a lot to be said for actually having a web-hosted solution these days. There are a lot of things you don't want to actually bother to manage yourself internally.

I think because we're starting to look at so many other areas that are potentially out in the cloud, such as we're using Workday for HR, and the potential integrations that we even have from a cloud perspective, once we've got ServiceNow and the ITSM piece of the cloud. Those are, I think, major selling points over just the overall flexibility over what we had in the previous product.

At this point in time, it's interesting because a lot of what I'm seeing, there's a lot of momentum right now towards ServiceNow. It's one of those things amongst everyone, not just in the industry; a lot, all over the place. It's in a major growth mode. I'm not entirely sure they're going to see too many of the other products being able to keep up. It's one of those things; if you're looking at future-proofing yourself, and there's a lot of this, there are a lot of strategies for going with a cloud partner. I realize there are some cloud competitors who have started up out there with ServiceNow. I've heard them infrequently, but it's kind of like, "Do you want to go with the company that's got the most resources and the most money to put toward development of their product, or in something where everybody's focusing on?" You've got a large third-party contingent supporting the product and things of that nature, and more and more development going toward it all the time. Or, "Do you want to go with something where you're not going to get the benefit of that same thing?" I think right now it would be hard to go with anybody else.