ServiceNow Reviews

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.

The ability to get in there and create stuff without worrying about setting everything up first. I like that we can get in there and kind of start developing right away, we don't have to worry about getting instances set up, we don't have to worry about getting everything provisional, all the networking stuff done, just get up and go.

Everybody can access it, and that's great. They take care of security.

They seem to be answering a lot of our problems that we've been having in trying to control the development, trying to control our other developers, and it sounds like they're giving us that. I definitely want to see Scoped get built out more though, it's great that they've got the Scoped functionality but, I want to make sure that we're able to do all of the same things we're able to do in the global inside the Scoped applications as well.

I've been using ServiceNow for about three or four years, but I've really been developing in it for about two years.

We've never really had too many issues and anything we have had has been self-inflicted, so it's not ServiceNow's fault.

I don't even know that we've had too many issues with trying to scale anything, it comes right ready for everybody to access it in the company. The only thing I would say we've encountered, we've come up with our own creative ways to kind of prevent certain people from accessing things. It's really scalable, it comes ready to go for the whole enterprise.

I think they're pretty decent. Sometimes you have to finagle their help best to get the right answers. We've had to escalate some issues before but for the most part we've gotten everything taken care of.

It's pretty straightforward, and every now and then we have to go in and make some changes, but really it's not that big of a deal and it kind of helps us keep modernizing our stuff too, so not so bad.

• The way it can integrate with other applications.
• How it can be a central hub for anything we need to do
• The fact that it's cloud based. That's huge for us.

It'd be nice to maybe have some help features or some nice how to's to where if you need something, this is what you do. If something broke, this is what you do. Have that more readily available and more straightforward.

I've personally used it for about a year.

I haven't had any problems. No latency. No issues.

I believe so. We're going to use this as our central point for so many things.

Very knowledgeable and very quick. The questions that we've had to have, or issues that we've had, we've had them answered extremely quick. I'm very happy about that.

We're slowly integrating it. They're still using Heat for incident management. They had nothing for project intake, for onboarding, or service requests so we're bringing those on now as well.

Our initial setup was not the best. We had some issues with it with the company that implemented it for us. We're with a different company now and it has been just fantastic. They've taken us through the whole thing, they've helped us out and they've worked with us step by step.

I would highly recommend it. I would say first thing you need to do is sit down and figure out how you're going to start with it and then, where do you want to expand from. Obviously, you don't want every module to start with. Start off with what's your biggest need or what's the easiest to implement and then go from there.

The development aspects within it are valuable. Incident, change and problem. It's given us one pane of glass to look at a lot of stuff, which has opened a lot of eyes to our IT department.

I did some app training and and got to see Helsinki. It was a little buggy, but I realize it's the next thing coming out, so it was good. I like the direction they're going.

I've personally used it for a little over two years.

Everything that we've had has been stable. We haven't had really any issues or anything.

It's very scalable.

I'd say they're proactive. Any of the tickets I've had open with them, they've gotten back to me in a timely manner and taken care of things.

We were using something before that was supposedly an ITIL platform, IncidentMonitor. As we expanded and got bigger it just wasn't an enterprise solution that we were looking for, so we looked at ServiceNow, and I can't remember the name of the other one we looked at. ServiceNow by far was the one to go with.

I think because we were so new and not knowing what the tool could do we really didn't have anybody that knew much about the product. We brought in a third party, and they had some quick starts that we used to get us up and rolling.

If they're coming into it new and they don't have any experience with it, I would say that they need to find a third party that can help get that tool rolling quickly. I would say that we didn't know enough. We went with a company early on, that I had mentioned earlier, that we weren't a hundred percent satisfied with. We switched over to a different company now that we're using, and it's better. It's not perfect. I would say that you need to go and you need to find somebody that can help get you started. If it's not another company that you can look to, third party come in and help out.

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.

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.

For our company, it would be incident management with the ability to track and report on that. Showing trends and then tying that into problem management as well. Also completing the whole circle, so problem management and change management. Having one system of record that everything is all tied together and you can connect the dots all the way around through the lifecycle.

Being at the help desk, we see trends and incidence from which we can create a problem to track a larger issue because it's effecting more than one user or more than one location for our restaurants. From there, we run down root cause of what's actually causing this problem to happen. Then from that the developers will kick off change requests to permanently fix the problem. But if you don't have the incident management to replace or the ability to report and trend, then you never know that problem's happening because we have a really quick fix that we do all the time. So being able to see that trending and get ahead of the problems and get them out of the environment makes everyone's life easier.

From our perspective, it's the ability to customize it and provide the different platforms. A good example is that within our organization we have incident forms that are tailored to IT and we have incident forms that are tailored to other groups, like accounting supply chain. They're using the exact same incident form, but they're customizing the fields that show up based on their groups so that they get the experience and reporting they need out of the product, but we're all using one system of record and one form to do that in so we can report holistically.

The other part of that is from a customer and restaurant facing standpoint, we can build out those seamless pages, create custom portals for the restaurants, because obviously the IT view or the back end users view is not what a customer wants to experience. It lets us create that front end view for a customer to get what they need and still have that logic to the system for it to flow through and everything.

I think some of the areas for improvement are some of the features that get added sometimes and not a lot of help and resources get devoted to them. A good example is inside of my self-service portal, we use heavily utilizing the wizards that will actually walk users through a guided experience, asking questions, giving responses to lead them where they want to go because in the restaurant industry not everyone wants to fill out forms. They just want to be led by the hand. They're hired to run restaurants, not run computers. So, there's very little documentation on how to use them and how to build them. It's kind of one of the features that got put in but never really expounded upon because it's not been used a lot. So, we really taught ourselves how to use them.

The other one would be what I'm looking at now which is coaching loops. Very little documentation. Very little understanding of how it works. Again, learning it on my own because the book explains this is kind of the fields and what they do, but very little as far as actually using it as available. I would say sometimes they're great features, and they're great additions, but if there's not a lot of user adoption, then not a lot of documentation gets written for them.

We've been on ServiceNow for about four and a half, almost five years, and we've just upgraded to Geneva.

I think the only issue we've had is our recent upgrade to Geneva went a little wonky. But I think that was partially our fault. We had gotten a little bit behind on patching Fuji and then jumped to Geneva Patch 5. I think there was items missed. Even though it should have been cumulative, I think we had some items that were missed in there.

The other issue we had is when we deployed ServiceNow, we started with domain separation. Mostly because the consulting company we used said that's the only way to do it. It probably shouldn't have been done, but that's not a reflection of the product as much as the consultants we used at the time.

We used Altiris. Maintaining Altiris servers was getting very expensive. They were hosted locally. We had a very old version of Altiris. We never kept up with the new version, so it never went to the cloud. So very old, very hard to maintain. The admin we had at the time was retiring. But probably the biggest standpoint was how limited Altiris was. You really could not customize it. If you wanted to build reporting, you had to have a sequel admin do it for you because there was no user interface for reporting. It was the system sped out the sequel queries that it was told to do, but you had to write them in sequel. So, it was not very user friendly.

I think in some ways we probably bit off more than we should have chewed, but we needed the product to replace Altiris. We had to fill that gap because of everything it did. From a stability standpoint, it was probably on the verge of collapse. We had to put a product in place to take it's place.

We worked with ServiceNow directly now, but during the implementation, we found a third party to do it for us. We were involved, but we also relied heavily on that third party consultant because Altiris had been the only thing we knew for so long that this was a complete change. It was our huge step forward.

Don't look at ServiceNow as what it can do for whatever department you're in, but try to get some buy in higher up in the organization because the more foundation and different groups you can get into ServiceNow at the beginning, the easier it is for the adoption. It really can become something for the entire organization. Getting that buy in from the beginning helps it grow a little faster.

If you've got 5 different groups that will be in it from the beginning, then some of the choices you're going to make are going to be a little bit different and they're going to be a little more future planned than, "I just need this for me". So, it's probably the biggest advice I can give is try to plan for the future.

I've seen other products. I've seen some of the stuff that they can do. Really haven't seen one that can, at least in my mind, replace our ServiceNow for everything that we've put into it, everything that we've done. It would be a very hard thing to do.

I would say it's that it's web based, relatively open, well integrated into different environment and OSN independent.

I would say database or data visibility. In fact, I think for me, I'm going for the physical side, most of the people like to access data without any constraints. We're in ServiceNow, it's not very easy to access the data on a very simple way. That would be a very good improvement, and you need some specific tools to access data or reporting. Sometimes it's not enough and that's the point.

I've used it for three years now. Partly as a developer and partly consulting with user groups.

I would say yes. Sometime some delay of latency but otherwise it is very stable.

We will see in the future but I think that Helsinki will be a very great improvement for us.

I have nothing to say about support. It's just nice.

We used BMC Remedy, and it was slightly different but we went for ServiceNow because it is more user oriented.

Prepare a very good Service Catalog first. Then you have a very good base to work on and then trying to adapt the interface to the user to the very basic user because it's the main problem we have to face too.