ServiceNow Reviews

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.

Reporting

Incident

Configuration

Visual Task Boards

Scheduling

Evanios Operations

Easy integration

Customized Dashboard as per user requirement

Scheduling reports has decreased manual effort.

Integration is possible with almost all monitoring tools and auto-ticketing functions properly.

A duplicate ticket option should be enabled - this feature can help to take the same information from a close incident thus decreasing manual time.

4 years

No issues.

Excellent (9/10)

Excellent (9/10)

In my previous organisation we used LanDesk which used to have less options. Hence switched to ServiceNow.

In-house one

No others were evaluated.

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.

Highly Customizable, Easy to integrate with third party applications, Configurable with little knowledge, Appealing UI, Automates processes.

By automating processes it has increased efficiency and productivity. As it was easy to understand customers easily adopted it.

A global search should be present OOB which can locate anything in the system like any piece of code or any sys id or any record so that we don't have to goto to each module for searching it.

More than 4 years.

No.

No. Very stable.

No.

Very prompt and efficient customer service.

Very good.

No.

It was straightforward and quite easy to deploy.

It has resulted in increase of efficiency which is our ROI.

Highly recommended.

ServiceNow gives you the opportunity to customize your portal according to your needs using the most recent frameworks such as bootstrap, AngularJS, jQuery, etc., or to simply code HTML tags or JavaScript. It contains some internal programming language, Glide, which is quite similar to normal JavaScript.

• Optimisation of service delivery across the supply chain.
• Better reliability and quality of service.
• Improved customer satisfaction and relationships.
• Our IT homepage improved how we order products internally, making it smooth.

The Project Management with Resource Management feature is an area with room for improvement. The timecard are not being considered when a resource is working on two projects and contains vacations or out of office days. The reports should be a lot better; maybe it could use SAP BusinessObjects, Tableau or QlikView in the background; that would be nice.

I rate customer service as high. The ServiceNow communities work quite well. There's a large of people with experience. They also publish a lot of content on youtube to bring out product features.

I rate technical support as high.

We previously used BMC ARS. We switched because it has helped to reduce operational IT costs by 30-50%.

PPS components such as Planning Console, Resource Workbench and the Visual Task Board are excellent add-ons to the OOTB lists and forms and provide a great way to add value to the Organization without having to opt for a point solution for each of these processes.

ServiceNow reduces drastically the time to value and it is possible to completely get rid of flat files such as spreadsheets and powerpoints in less than a month for any Organizational process.

ServiceNow offers Angular components that greatly enhance User Experience. Pages such as the Resource Workbench to allocate resource, Planning Console for Waterfall planning and Demand Workbench to prioritize demands all contribute to adding value to a ServiceNow implementation project. On the flip side, until very recently the overall UX experience was very poor as everything is either based on a form or a list. Hopefully with the release of Service Portal and as it evolves in future releases, web developers will have more and more flexibility to improve on the OOTB UI capabilities.

Deployment through Update Sets can be challenging at first but after some practice they become easy as a breeze.

Stability is assured by the Vendor. No issues found so far.

Easily scalable as the Vendor assumes availability at all times.

Very good. Quick response and very customer friendly.

Technical support hours can be negotiated with contract and with so many community resources most of the times it's not even needed to recur to the Vendor.

Setup requires someone who understands the default data model in order to quickly identify synergies between requirements and OOTB capabilities.

Licensing model is not easy to understand and is constantly evolving. For example, just recently ServiceNow changed the PPS licensing model (now Service Strategy) to distinguish between users who only perform assigned tasks (workers) and planners.

The speed of being able to do stuff. Once you know where to put your code, it's very fast to put it somewhere and have it running.

More publications about what plug-ins are available.

I've personally used it for about a year.

There's been very little downtime in the year we've had it. I think we've had one outage that was five minutes or so.

Product-wise, I think it's scalable. The pricing model is a little bit prohibitive for us.

They've been great. I haven't used them much in the year that I've done it. I've only had maybe two incidents logged, but they were great with them.

The community is good most of the time. People will answer questions so it's a pretty good community.

We just did the Fuji to Geneva, and there were a lot of issues. I think it was because we've done a lot of customizations on forms, adding things, and what-not that broke when we moved to Geneva. The other guys who have been there for longer have said it was pretty difficult in comparison to the other upgrades.

It's kind of preventing us from using it on other things because of the licensing model.

It's worth it, but have a good team around you to help you do it right. Having a team has been good to bounce ideas off of, especially when people have been using it in our organization for maybe eight or nine years. There's always someone who knows, "Oh don't do this," or "Do it that way."

I'm the unit manager of the network operations center so I'm a core user of the tool. I don't get involved in the development, deployment or support of it, but we get a lot of tickets in the network operations center. I think probably some of the best things the tool brings to us revolve around the ability to manage all of our work. The intake of the work, tracking it and helping it move through the different processes so tracking incidents, then times they turn into a problem that we have to follow up and come up with a root cause.

For me as the manager of the network operations center, it's mainly around being able to track our work, know who is working on what, what our work volume is, how it ties to the different services that we support.

The reporting is one piece that's a lot of interest to me in the network operations center. We don't have a ton of metrics today mainly because we haven't put the effort in that direction, but we want to. I poked around on the reporting a little bit and I went to a session [at Knowledge16] on performance analytics. I thought, gee this looks like what I'm after but we have yet to purchase that module. I don't know if we will or won't so I guess I don't have enough experience to say. I see the potential there.

I think it's bringing a lot of stuff that's been handled by a lot of different applications and a lot of different areas in one place. We grew up with a few different areas which had their own tools for a long time for ticketing and managing assets. Basically bringing it all into one place I think is very beneficial.

I would say there really isn't anything I found that I really dislike. Now the caveat to that statement is we've been going at the deployment for a while. Again, I'm the user, the consumer side of the tool. What I'm waiting and watching to see is, as these new modules roll out, as we implement change and knowledge base, I've got myself and my group, we've got a lot of work to do yet just to learn the tool as it is today. We haven't really gotten into it far enough to say, "Gee I really don't like this."

The sense I get just from some of the classes that I've taken where I've been poking around in some of the tools that we don't have yet, I do see there's definitely a learning curve involved. Now I look at it like there's a learning curve involved in any new tool you bring into your organization. I think the overall pain of the learning curve maybe less when you have a common tool like the ServiceNow. If I get over the learning curve for problem management, for example, I'm probably halfway there with change, incident and the rest of them. A lot of things you're going to learn and want are applicable together. I think overall the total learning curve will probably be less.

I haven't had any issues. As a matter of fact since we've been using it, I can't think of one time where it was unavailable or had an issue. I haven't seen that as an issue from an end user perspective. I have it up periodically. The folks in my unit have it up all the time to monitor the queues and I haven't heard any issues with it.

I really haven't been involved in that side of it, we're the development side. From an end user, I think just as I've watched them enable more modules, bring on more things, I haven't noticed any kinds of performance issues.

We used BMC Remedy for ticketing system. We never really had a CMDB as we had various databases that housed different information so BMC Remedy, is the main one that comes to mind that we used prior to ServiceNow, that we'll be sun setting. We actually had some in-house tools as well that we developed.

We did so to manage things like our change records and actually that really was the formal IT CMDB if you will. We had some home-grown tools as well that we're working on sun setting.

There's another group in our organization that's responsible for the purchasing decisions. One of the things I heard that was maybe of concern to me, is that we had our in-house system that we used to communicate to our end user groups around change. I have some concerns about the ability in ServiceNow and the capability to notify end users of changes. I think if I was not mistaken that's in part due to licencing. We have about two thousand IT people versus total of about sixty thousand employees.

I believe there was a licencing cost issue around if I want all those people to be able to subscribe to change notifications. I don't quite understand how that works fully but I get the sense that there was maybe some cost challenges with that. From an end user perspective and the network operations center, we make a lot of changes that have the potential impact, large geographical areas and try to figure out how do to notify our end users. That's what I don't really know yet, how that ServiceNow tool is going to help us do that. We're still trying to figure that piece out.

One piece of advice I would give you from my perspective is that if you're going to deploy it, make sure you put the appropriate amount of effort into training the end users. I think there is some complexity learning how to navigate it and I think for a lot of people having a document to follow is challenging sometimes. Make sure you put the appropriate amount of emphasis on training. I've been in IT for about 26 years, I've seen a lot of this stuff grow up in pieces.

It's filling a niche I think a lot of people have really, really wanted which is bringing a lot of this information into one central location. The various areas of IT can no longer operate in a vacuum, it has to operate as one large cohesive IT department that aligns with the business. I think a tool like this helps bring a lot of that stuff into one place.