ServiceNow Reviews

We used ServiceNow for various functions like incident management, ITSM (information technology service management), and we also used it for CMDB (configuration management database).

I worked for a manufacturing company and we were using ServiceNow for managing the company's IT functions, particularly for ITSM.

In my current company, we use it for CMDB.

I found the reporting capabilities of ServiceNow really valuable.

The service catalog feature is also interesting, particularly because it is highly customizable. You can create anything you want to create. This is one of the good things I like about ServiceNow.

Its integration capabilities is also a valuable feature because you can connect ServiceNow with any other application.

What could be improved in ServiceNow is the response time or loading time. It's slower, but it could be based on the license you have. Everybody here in our company says it is slow whenever we access it, so that needs improvement.

The user interface can also be improved. They should make it better than what it is currently. It should be more user-friendly.

An additional feature I'd like to see in ServiceNow has something to do with its out of the box pattern. Currently, I'm using it mainly for CMDB. Each company will have different hardware or configuration items, but ServiceNow only provides certain scripts or patterns to discover all these onto the CMDB.

If there's any new device, we'll need to customize the out of the box pattern, so maybe that's a feature that can be improved. With any device you add, everything should be added on the CMDB using whatever out of the box pattern or script is provided in ServiceNow. Currently, that is not the case.

If we have a new device that is added to our company's network, we have to go and customize the existing ServiceNow pattern to discover that device. This is the problem we're facing.

I've been using ServiceNow for two years.

This tool is stable. It performs well, but like I mentioned, its response time can be improved, but overall, it's good. It's reliable.

I find this tool easy to scale.

Every now and then, we'll face some issues with scripting, pattern, etc. We always go to the HI portal which is the maintenance portal of ServiceNow, and there we ask for support by raising a ticket to ServiceNow directly.

The support is not 100% good, because sometimes we experience delays in their responses, but it's okay. It's not bad. They'll see to it that they resolve the issues, but it may not always be on time.

We used BMC Remedy, but since we were using a very old version, we can't compare it to ServiceNow. ServiceNow is a lot better and more user-friendly compared to that tool.

For large-scale companies, the cost of ServiceNow is not expensive, but for small and mid-scale companies, it is higher. I worked with large organizations and they never had a problem with the cost, so it depends on how large the company is.

I evaluated BMC Remedy.

I'm using the latest version of ServiceNow.

I was not involved in the initial setup of ServiceNow, whether in my previous or in my current company. I do not know much about it, but how easy or complex the setup is will depend on the company. If it is a large-scale company, the initial setup would be complex and it'll take a lot of time.

Even if it's deployed on cloud, it would still require maintenance. We just purchase the licenses and initially during deployment and training, they'll help. After that, it depends on the company to manage and maintain the solution. If we get into any issues, we'll definitely need to reach out to them.

We are 1,000 people in IT, so we have 1,000 IT users of ServiceNow. As for end users, we have between 30 to 40,000 employees in the company, and at least 30,000 employees will submit a request or incident using ServiceNow. We're using this tool on a daily basis.

I don't think there is any additional costs, as support is covered in the standard fees, but I could be wrong, as I was not involved in the initial setup or financial discussion, so I wouldn't know much about it.

My advice to others looking into using ServiceNow is that they can do their research and ensure that this platform is the one they're looking for. If after reading all the information and comparing different ITSM options available, they find that ServiceNow suits their business, then they can go for it. They should not go for it blindly, because there could be many others which are better than this solution. They should research well before they make their decision.

My score for ServiceNow is a seven out of ten.

We use this solution mostly for ITSM, but we also have customers who use it for customer service management and item discovery.

The features I found most valuable in this solution are usually also found on other platforms like the Visual Task Boards.

For change management, I find the CAB workbench very useful. I haven't seen any other solution that has a CAB workbench or advanced automated solutions for a change advisory board. That's one of the perks of ServiceNow. Other perks include the Visual Task Boards and the Virtual Agent. ServiceNow also has the Workflow Engine which works very well and is very intuitive. Some of the development tools give you a lot of freedom in terms of changing processes. That's what we like.

This solution needs to be improved for global use. Currently, it's very oriented to the processes and needs of the US customer base, like their compliance solution or GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance), and not so much for customers from other parts of the world. Some users may like the things that ServiceNow is improving, but those are very oriented to users based in the United States and Europe.

In Latin America which is the geographical region we work in, it's not very useful. Some of the customers are more interested in other solutions. Sometimes they put aside ServiceNow because it is focused on the needs of the customer base in Europe and the US. This is one of the disadvantages I see.

Another disadvantage is the level of maturity that the customer has to have to get value from a solution like ServiceNow. The customer needs to have a great level of maturity. A company that is starting its journey with ITSM wouldn't find ServiceNow very useful, because sometimes there's a considerable amount of code you need to know to be able to implement ServiceNow. This will depend on the complex needs that a customer may have, for the customer to find ServiceNow as a useful solution. Depending on the level of maturity they have, they would need that amount of customization. I don't see the need for coding as a problem. The problem I see is that the level of maturity that the customer needs to have is high.

There's quite a lot of features in ServiceNow. Currently, we haven't had any sort of need that ServiceNow and the features that they already have, don't resolve. There's no feature that I can think of right now that I'd like to be added in the next release.

There are some guidelines that ServiceNow has that automate the implementation, but they're available only for ITSM and ITOM. It would be good if those automated guidelines are also made available for other ServiceNow solutions like customer service management, configuration management, and asset management.

Another area for improvement is the lack of clarity in terms of how this solution is licensed. It is usually very complicated for customers to know how they are being charged for the licenses that they consume. In most of the ServiceNow solutions, this problem is persistent.

There might be some bias because we are ServiceNow partners and we're also Freshworks partners. We're not users. We're partners. We implement both solutions for customers.

We used cloud-based deployment.

We've been working with ServiceNow for quite some time.

I evaluated BMC.

Some of the customers are interested in Acquire when they think of ServiceNow.

My advice to others looking into implementing ServiceNow is for them to really know what the objective of the implementation is: what they're trying to fix and what problem they're trying to solve. They have to be very conscious of these things because if they are not, the solution may not be a good fit. It's going to be too big of a problem to solve. They need to have a high level of maturity to get everything they need from a platform like ServiceNow.

I'm rating this solution a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for IT Operational Management.

Everything about the schema, including the design of ServiceNow, is great. 

It's scalable. That's what attracts me most. 

You can configure it to fit your client's requirements. You can extend your functionalities, and then the workflow.

The stability is very good.

It's moving at a very fast pace. It is difficult for developers or engineers to keep up with it. That's the only issue. 

For the customer it's expensive. 

I've been using the solution for seven years or so. It's been a while. 

The stability is great. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is scalable. It's easy to expand if you need to. You can use it no matter the size of your organization - from small to large. 

We haven't had any issues with technical support. We are satisfied with the level of service on offer. 

The initial setup is excellent. There are no issues dealing with the implementation.

It's very expensive, and if care is not taken, competitions can quickly come and take over the space by offering better pricing.

We use both cloud and on-premises deployments. 

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. They're doing what you need to do. They provide a roadmap, which is good.

We mostly use ServiceNow for incident management. There is a team which interacts with the customers and logs customer issues as incidents. Then those incidents are taken care of by my team. I work on the escalation side of that team.

That is one aspect of ServiceNow. The second thing we use it for are any economic, long-term or repetitive problems. We log problem tickets which are resolved in ServiceNow.

The third use is for changes in the system. All the changes to the system are logged in ServiceNow with their associated tasks. Those are the three major use cases for ServiceNow.

The feature that I have found most valuable from ServiceNow is the ability to assign sub-tasks to different teams, including problem tickets and the regular and chain tasks. For example, if there is a chain which requires different steps of execution validation or execution steps, those task divisions, as well as the assignment and ownership of the tasks, is something that is really useful in ServiceNow.

The major area for improvement for our needs would be monitoring the metrics of the times to acknowledge and resolve issues and escalations. For example, if there is an incident which is not acknowledged within a certain period of time, or the resolution of the incident exceeds a certain period of time, it can be escalated to the next levels. That is one of the things you're looking for which is not available with ServiceNow.

The second feature I would be looking for is integration with different tools, like Bugzilla, Microsoft Informer, and Jira. Jira has integration, in fact. Teams in different organizations use different tools, so integrating those tools would be really helpful.

I have been using ServiceNow for two years.

It is quite a stable solution. In the last couple of years we probably had around one or two outages and only one major outage. So it's very stable.

ServiceNow is quite scalable. 

I would say there are about 400 people using ServiceNow in the organization. That includes administrators, users and those who maintain ServiceNow. Currently, ServiceNow gets daily usage.

I don't usually get in touch with support directly because I am not an end user.

In my previous company we used a custom-built tool which was not available on the market. It was called My Article Support and was built internally specifically for big biotic collection. It was highly customized and it catered to a lot of our needs.

One of the features in that tool was based on the customer engagement level and not on the revenue impact that customer had on the organization or the number of users impacted, etc... It would generate the incident prioritization score, which determined how quickly we were supposed to work on the incident. So the prioritization of incidents was automated, which I do not find in ServiceNow. But that tool was very customized and it was internally built so the development was done in-house. The second thing was the ability to track and close escalations because it was a custom-built tool and there was a process for it. The process was defined and was in the documentation.

I was actually not there when the setup was done so I can't answer that.

You need to find a tool that suits your needs. For example, the ServiceNow tool has certain advantages but at this point, one of the major things I'm looking for is tracking an escalation based on acknowledging the resolution. Meaning, I'm looking for something which is different compared to ServiceNow. It probably depends on your needs but for certain use cases, it does work very well, and maybe you need to do a deep dive or evaluate it before you buy anything.

On a scale of one to ten I would rate ServiceNow a seven.

• Work intake 
• Project management 
• Project for a 30 person marketing and communications team at a Big 4 professional services firm.
  

• It helps improve service levels and reduce team stress.  

• It provides internal clients with greater transparency about their projects and deliverables.

• Ability to configure a service catalog with defined SLAs.

• Single window for all work requests.
• Ability to bundle various deliverables into a single project work request.

None.

None.

We used a homebrew solution developed by (and for) our IT department. It was far too complex for marketing users.

The setup was time-consuming and required a lot of internal resources. 

We used an in-house team.

The IT department conducted a vendor evaluation, but I am not aware of which solutions were considered.

It is a very robust tool. We use it for all back office teams in the firm, resulting in a common interface and intake process across HR, IT, Marketing, and Finance.

I think the most valuable feature is just the ability to take the whole organization and put it in one place. Traditionally, my background has been in service desk, and so someone who call with a problem and we would deal with it. If it was outside of that scope, it was outside of our system, and so we had to go to someone else's tracking system or someone else's system of record. With ServiceNow, all of a sudden if someone calls us with a facilities request, we don't have to just palm them off and say, "Call this number." We can go into the facilities app and say, "Oh, here's how you get your work order done. Here's how you handle this type of request." It just enabled us to see the whole organization as a single organization, which, especially for higher ed and places like that, just doesn't happen. Everybody has their own little silos, and this gave us a chance to unify that.

Traditionally people saw different facets of IT as different areas of responsibility, so incidents were handled by one group, and problems were handled by another, but they never really called them that. They just called them "tickets," or they called them "emergencies," or they called them whatever they did, and so looking at ITSM, you can look at sort of a workflow of a thing, and so enough incidents becomes a problem, and problems need change, and that sort of thing, and so for us, it was not just about, "We need a better way to track stuff," but it was, "We need a better way to see how that workflow works so that people other than just the folks in the trenches doing the work can see how that works and see how the organization works together," so again, for us, it was about unification. It was about seeing that it was everybody's problem, and not just whoever was holding the baton at a certain time.

The biggest hassle we have for ServiceNow has been licensing. We have a lot of student workers. When you have cheap labor that's right at your doorstep, you can't turn them down, and so we have a lot of functions at the university, not just in service desk, but also in housing and in customer support, that is handled by student workers that don't work all the time. They work ten hours a week, or they work five hours a week, but they consume the same type of license as an eighty-hour-week employee, and because of that, in some departments, it's prohibitively expensive to use ServiceNow, because if you have a hundred student workers that are only working ten hours a week, you have to pay for a hundred idle licenses, and that can be a huge speed bump into getting them to adopt it, whereas with our other platforms it was concurrent licensing, and we could just buy a bucket of licenses and hand them out.

There are some initiatives to improve that, but for right now, that's still a big stumbling block for us is, that's really stopping our momentum is, we go to a department, we give them a great pitch, and they ask for the price, and it really is a big issue.

We went live just over a year ago, and we had a fairly quick implementation period, so we had only used it for a few months prior to that, as far as building it, and that sort of thing, so just under two years.

In fact, it solved a lot of those issues for us, because our Remedy implementation was all on-prem, so we had database servers we had to update, we had Tomcat servers. We had every other kind of thing, and not enough staff to run them, and so it really was an effort whenever we had to bring a service outage back that we didn't know sort of what was happening. Same thing with upgrades. You had to coordinate several people, and it was a lot of effort, whereas now it's literally just, "Hey, we need to do a patch this weekend, so let change know that we're doing a patch," and in the morning the patch would be there, and so from our standpoint, that was really the biggest thing, is that we haven't seen the issues now that we saw previously. As far as implementation, uptime, we really haven't had any problems.

We used BMC's Remedy product, but it was traditionally call tracking, and so it really didn't unify it under any sort of framework. It was just call tracking and knowledge, and so ServiceNow gave us an opportunity to see it, just to open the world of ITSM up, we hadn't been exposed to before, and see that you could actually bring all that stuff together in one place and resolve it more efficiently.

The technical aspects of it were fairly straightforward. We knew we wanted to change, and so never let a good crisis go unused, and so we knew we were changing products, and we wanted to change philosophies too, so we didn't spend a lot of time making ServiceNow look like Remedy, and that helped out, but what it also meant is that we hit a lot of resistance from people that had to move towards that new product, that it didn't look like the old stuff, and so from a technical standpoint, I had a top-notch architect, and he came in and he knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew how he wanted to do it, and so when we went to the customers, that was really the issue is, they wanted more of a vote, they wanted it to look like their view of how it looked, so technically? No, very easy. Politically, sort of new process, sort of point of view, it was a little bit harder, but the technical aspect's very easy to handle.

I would have them analyze their business and see if they had the drive to move to a system like ServiceNow. ServiceNow was a huge jump for us because it was seeing the world differently, and some universities, particularly smaller ones, don't have the willpower to make that jump, and so what I would tell them is, "There is a lot of potential here, and if you're ready for it, grab it with both hands, and just do it, but if you're not, back off." I mean, they have the ServiceNow Express that's sort of a light way to get into the system, but I think my advice would be, to do your due diligence. Make sure that your organization is invested, and it's not just a couple of people who want to buy a new package, and when you're ready, go for it. There's a huge community that can back you up, and there's a lot of support that you can get, but if you're not, then don't waste your time and everybody else's moving to a system that you might not be ready for.

It all goes back to potential that it is a platform. It is not just, "Here are your round pegs, and here's our square hole. Do the best you can." It's really, it's got the potential to do a lot of good. There are some things that I have issues with because I don't think higher education is a demographic that ServiceNow is really comfortable with yet, and so there are problems there that they don't realize, like the student thing.

I think once they get the higher ed stuff more up to speed, and they've got SIGs now, and they've got panels, and that sort of thing, so I think they're getting there, but for right now, it's not really a demographic they focused on, and so I'd like for them to pay more attention to that.

I use ServiceNow for analytics, but my team uses it for incident management. Those are the two most valuable things that we use it for.

I'd like to see improvement in their mobile space just because that's certainly my priority. I'll also like to see improvements more in their reporting in analytics still. I think they're getting there, but I'd like to see a little bit more from what they have right now.

We've been using ServiceNow for two years.

Perhaps we only had one issue that I can remember that we had a downtime, but other than that it's been very stable and very consistent.

It's still to be determined. In fact, I need to find out if it scales specifically for mobile devices. We have thousands and thousands of mobile devices out there around the world, and so we're trying to see if we can implement ServiceNow to scale to that number.

It was implemented by our engineering group, so my supports go straight to them. My understanding is that our solutions manager owns the product. My understanding is that he gets good support from ServiceNow, but direct support from ServiceNow, I don't directly do that. I go through our engineering group for that.

We were using HPE Service Management, but it was cumbersome. It was really not user-friendly. ServiceNow helped us, plus added value of workflow. We use a lot of workflow as well. We use that. That was the greatest value for that.

I didn't set it up for our organization, or I think my team didn't set it up, but for our instance for our group, it was seamless. The migration of data has been seamless for us as well. At least, that was our experience in our department. There's multiple departments, it's my organization. The data, the which one was the biggest one, transitioning from the old HPSM to the ServiceNow has been consistent and very good.

I recommend the product and I think there's potential for it. For the features that we have now, it's been day and night difference from what we've had.

The ability to manipulate or customize all of the underlying structure.

That's a really hard question because their target audience is so diverse. They've got everything from medical to university and everything in-between. For me personally, I would say all these new features, these new things that they're doing are awesome, but I want documentation on what they're doing on the underside, what they're doing behind the scenes. I think I'm honestly in the minority with that. I think most people want to just get some admins and have them be able to do everything that a developer can do. I would say as far as marketing or sales, I would say they're probably going in the right direction. Enabling the admins to do more and more and more, while locking down, so they don't muck around and screw stuff up.

I've used it for four years.

It doesn't crash. They have a terrific up time, but I would expect that when you have four redundancies, that goes without saying. I would say that for the things that I like to do, which is muck around in the underlying, I would say that it's going downhill.

The most recently released Geneva locked up a bunch of stuff. A good example is UI16. There's a bunch of stuff that's undocumented and it's locked away. It makes it very hard to get to. I would say that's a definite negative.

As far as I'm aware, it scales beautifully. You just throw another stack or two or 20 at it and off you go. We make a lot of custom apps, custom modules, which is why I muck around in the underside. As far as that goes, for scalability the sky is the limit.

They're a funny group. I've never had a ticket that I've submitted to support that was answered by the initial person that received it. It usually ends up going to their tier two or in some cases, the developer. I don't know how to answer that question because the questions I ask are very hard. I've been doing it for a long time. I'm sure that the support team is fantastic for someone that's new to the product or hasn't used it before but for me it's a bit of a rigmarole.

Actually, it's very complex. Usually, you're doing it with a partner. Most institutions have partnered with someone to help them with an implementation. How well it goes is usually on the implementation engineer or their team's shoulders. I have gone through an implementation that was just horrific and we made it work. I've seen implementations that go fantastic. You just turn a key and there it goes. I would say it really depends on the quality of your implementation engineer.

I would ask about the use case. What are you trying to solve? What are you trying to do? Then I would advise based on their feedback provided and their budget. Some budgets are very small and I don't know if they would work with this solution.