ServiceNow Reviews

It's all about the level of usefulness ServiceNow brings to IT. They all affect legacy systems, so if you compare it with other tools, the edge which ServiceNow was there from day one. Usability, application customizations and ease of building your own product within the tool was a very positive edge for ServiceNow to be leaps and bounds beyond the market tools.

We have done multiple implementations across various industry structures, industry verticals like manufacturing, automobiles, healthcare, aerospace, and federal government implementations. All these implementations are different in its each unique way based on how many users use it, the locations of those users and all that. What I'm trying to say is even if there are multiple customizations, the number of users are different, we've never seen any stability issues compared to other industry leading tools. It's pretty stable.

Definitely discovery software and management. Then talk about CMDB, how they arrange all those CMDB tables. Those are a few areas of improvement that they can make better.

I've been using ServiceNow for the past six years. From the initial days where they were on a on-premise implementation, I've been using ServiceNow products.

8/10 - because when you're talking about scalability there are a lot of factors. You're talking about user scalability, we're talking about application scalability, talking about what ServiceNow can achieve. They are very good with custom applications, building capability, and the ability to maintain them. The only thing is once you kind of get into that part, then when you do upgrades you're probably going to need to work on those custom applications to make sure everything works fine. Apart from that, they're a pretty robust and scalable platform for workload.

They're responsive. Knowledgeable - it's kind of questionable because the problem they are also facing is expanding leaps and bounds. Everybody wants to get on the ServiceNow bandwagon. They're probably also having issues with resourcing and training those people to kind of address the right questions and all that. Each and every problem is unique so there's a need to find a senior resource and assign the ticket. The whole addressing duration, issue disintegration, would definitely take longer in case of your level one is not so equipped. That's what I observed.

It's straightforward.

It's serving our end-user community, making it simple for them to order products, get service from our incident help desk, and perhaps even helping everyone across the globe because we have to stay connected somehow, and ServiceNow does that for us.

We've just launched the visual task boards in the last year, so we're still learning how to do that effectively. Right now, we're trying to do a comparison of what we do with our internal chat and using the chat inside ServiceNow, so a lot of things that we're still learning, and we're trying to break ground so to speak, so that we can get better.

I think I want to focus in on our assets. We do many things for studios, and internally, we use a lot of hardware, so we want to be able to find and understand where our assets sit. If there's a breakdown in communication, how do we service that? We've recently launched with one of the certified partners. How we do a better job in tracking those assets once it comes on location, and then it gets into the inventory. That's the key piece. It's how do we manage those assets, manage the cost, manage where they are, and make sure people have access to that equipment.

Maybe cost in one sense because when you make that investment from the other side of it, you're looking at the cost, but we've been having that ongoing debate. Empty glass could be your cost, but the full glass or maybe half full, or half empty. If it's half full, that means you're getting great things out of it. If it's half empty, you're so worried about the cost. Where are you going to trim. We're going down the path of, "How do we shape our roadmap so that we understand what that investment is going to do for us?" We're using the Champions Enablement Tool to help us chart that out. We have our own internal tool, and there's a lot of similarities, but I think what we want to do is just channel it the way ServiceNow is intending it to.

We've been on it since Calgary, so we were early adopters. We're currently on Fuji. We will probably move to Geneva probably in the fall.

Recently, we've been working with the support because they've been notifying us that there are certain things that may be slowing down our system. Right away, they've advised us that they have that ability to transition us seamlessly and to help us with our connectivity. There are some complaints internally still that we're trying to wade through, but overall we've been quite happy with it. Connectivity for the most part has been very good.

It's tremendous. Just recently, we rolled out the GRC module. It was specific to one of our security teams. At the moment, it was just to help them with their auditing, how they manage their compliance. Now, the part of the business has gotten wind that this is out there. It was demoed. Now, people are coming to us in that sense.

The Service Catalog continues to grow over a hundred service catalog forms, and people want to get rid of the old email in our office, department envelopes, the email, and the shoulder tapping. Now, we're able to centralize them through the portal. In fact, that's another thing, the portal that we have. We had user issues with the community portal on Eureka.

It was scattered. It was decentralized, so people in their own locations were tracking a certain way or doing things a certain way. Some people had barcoding systems and scanned assets, while other locations were just eyeballing it and logging it onto spreadsheets. We knew there's a problem, and just like the Chief Product Officer is saying, you want to automate where you can, and this is where we want to go.

We went out to go get a certified partner's product and cross-views, and they've helped us really just make it look and feel more friendly than when now you look at Helsinki, it's like right in alignment of where we are today and where we want to continue to go, so those are the other things that we have to weigh out.

I wasn't part of that implementation team. I came in to really get the program together because we had our enterprise architect team implement it. However, I think the guys had fun implementing it because they were looking forward to actually getting it in place, start using it, and start deploying it. 

Upgrades through the years have been pretty tough. We didn't get the sandbox right away, so it made hard on our users where we have to do all the testing and make sure we understand the differences between out of the cloud versus what we did with custom development. That took just a little bit longer in analysis and testing implementation.

First question I would ask is, "What are you waiting for? You've described to me all your problems that you're having. You're decentralized. You're disparate. You have all these things that are hanging out there. You don't have a way to communicate essentially through people. Come on board."

I took the governance class. It was a day and a half, and I sat at a table with people that had the same problems. We had a new implementation in the two months prior. We have someone that's on a competitor's application, and they've already made the decision to come in ServiceNow, but it took the management team to say, "Hey, we need to do this. We got to get better at what we're doing." Really, it's all practical in the sense of filling the need, and it's making it simple not only for the end-user, but if you saw the key note today, the backend where the developers and the systems. It's going to be really helpful for everyone.

It's right from our own internal processes, and matching staffing needs, and meeting the customers' needs, and then also ServiceNow coming in where cost has to be helpful to us. We know the platform is there.

The platform as a service and the capability to build our own custom apps. Also, the built in work flow engine as we're able to create our own work flows, but that the engine is already there and it speeds application development.

We are using ServiceNow to replace some applications on systems that we're hoping to be able to retire. It's helpful to be able to get new applications up and going quickly, and the work flow engine helps a lot with that.

Using it as our ITSM solution, it has helped us to move a lot of our different processes onto the same platform, which helps with reporting and tracking and that sort of thing.

We still have some issues with some of our ITIL users, like some things aren't as intuitive as they could be. Related to being able to see things, like what tasks are assigned to them. Service Catalog and request fulfilment is the main module we use right now, or effects the most people, and so the learning curve for some of our ITIL users is a little higher than we would like in some cases.

We have had some issues over time. I think at times, they've ramped us up or given us more processing power. A few times we've had outages lately here too. Sometimes it does seem slow. We've kind of learned not to bring up a list with a thousand items in it. Sometimes there's something that you run that you expect to get a response in a couple seconds and the counter counts up to 45 seconds before you get your response back, so there's certainly some issues. We've seen a few bugs, but no show stoppers.

We're on the small side of ServiceNow installations. It's just for our plant, so it's not like our whole operation. So, we haven't had any scaleability issues other than we've seen some latency sometimes. I don't know how much of that might have been related to needing to scale up a little bit.

We had a custom Lotus Notes database that we were using for request fulfilment before, but some of the other pieces that ServiceNow fills in we had various solutions for. We switched because ServiceNow gives us more capabilities as far as giving us one platform to be able to have a lot of our systems on and it has a lot of functionality there just out of the box. A lot of plug-ins you can just turn on and have some functionality, which of course, we want to customize. But, being able to roll out something like that so quickly helps.

The initial implementation did take a while. It was fairly complex. We engaged ServiceNow to help us with that. Our ServiceNow also engaged a business partner to help us with roll out initially. Going through that process did take a while, but we had the workshops and training in place to help make that easier.

It was through ServiceNow, but they were busy at the time, so we had a ServiceNow project manager. To help, ServiceNow also brought in a third party and the third party was stronger than our ServiceNow program manager or project manager was, and wasn't nearly as strong as the business partner was.

ServiceNow is not cheap, especially as we continue to pay for it year after year, but it is helping us be more efficient from the perspective of taking less time to make sure that our requests are fulfilled and to bring out new features and functionality.

It would help to know more about a specific situation to give advice, but it is nice that there's a decent sized ServiceNow community and Wiki that you can find what you need. If you see a demo or see some of what ServiceNow can do, it's certainly worth looking into. However, to give more specific advice, I'd need to know more.

I think there's some things about that that ServiceNow could have implemented better, but the software in general is good and solid.

There's pretty much nothing that I have found yet that I couldn't accomplish within ServiceNow if I wanted to. I think for us, we tried several times to implement a CMDB, a configuration management database, and it failed for various reasons. With ServiceNow, we were able to finally do that. My boss refers to that as the pink unicorn, the mythical creature that did not exist.

We finally made that happen with ServiceNow. I feel that CMDB is actually my license plate.

I think historically we have had a real warrior spirit. We would get in there and do it and sometimes that meant we would write something in house. I think that we would invest a whole lot of time on something, and we would get real attached to it. Then the next thing you knew, you blinked your eyes, and we were behind the times. I think that we've made a giant leap or two in the last year, year and a half or so, that we've been using ServiceNow, that I've been involved with.

Now we have invested the time in the CMDB. We've invested the time in a portal and catalog items and now we're moving towards automation and things. We moved from Eureka to Geneva and now we've got this whole fresh look and all these new features. We're able to stay a lot more current a lot faster because ServiceNow is doing the work to keep the platform updated, whereas we can just continue to provide value that is specific to us and what we're trying to do.

There's some platform code that is compiled and its Java code on the server side. There's no documented API on what the functions and properties are of that code, and we're not able to reflect that code to get it to make our own API. I think some of the platform devs have met with me in the developer hub and said that they are working to provide that because they can see why we'd want it. I'm excited to hear that that gap will get closed soon.

Also, some of the way that the patches would break the catalog and the catalog items would cause unnecessary changes to the lay out in the UI. Like moving a field label from the left to underneath. If you have 30 items on a page, or more, that's going to offset everything. Unnecessary moves and then unnecessary moves back, stuff like that.

It's pretty solid. I think that on our dashboard it says 99.8% availability. Now a lot of my customers in the service desk that do our support line, over the phone or through chat, they're telling me that the CMDB look up for config items on the incoming incidents that they're starting, is way faster in Geneva. They've set it, set it, and reset it. It wasn't just a first impression. It's a lasting, "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you." They sent a special email. We don't normally have people that are raving fans of anything you provide tool wise. We have our customers who are usually raving fans on our airlines. This was kind of surprising to hear.

We add users constantly. We on-board people and they are automatically added. We have a portal that's internal for our users that don't need to do changer class but they do need to request things in the catalog so those people are able to log in and request stuff.

We didn't successfully implement a CMDB. I think different work groups were very siloed and they had the problem of, "Where's our stuff?" They each solved that problem on their own because there was no centralized management database. Some people used spreadsheets. Some people used Wiki Documents or Wiki Documents with spreadsheets in them. Other people just had it in their heads and like, "We'll go ask Jim or go ask Bob. Oh, Bob left. I'm sorry. Go ask Tim. Maybe Bob told Tim before he left." It was like that. What we were able to do was use this as the first product that actually worked. We did try a few other products but we weren't able to get that off the ground. I don't know if that really speaks to those products or if it was the lack of support that we had from our leadership to get it done. I wasn't involved so I don't remember who it was, but I don't believe they were home-grown.

We used a tiered approach. We did like five or six release cycles to get to where we are. We started with CMDB and change management at the same time and I think that that really worked well. When we were working in Remedy, our CMDB only kind of had Oracle database names and host names. Windows or Linux host names and that's it. It was pretty flat and people were used to it and it wasn't a whole lot of information to ask people to put in their change request. When we came over, we were able to stand up change and people were satisfied with just having the host names, which was fairly simple. Then we were able to do kind of a crawl, walk, run, run with scissors sort of thing. I think that it went well.

Come to a user group meeting and we'd love to connect, meet and show you what we've done and talk about where you're at and give you some feedback and advice about what worked, what didn't work, what we thought might work better.

As a platform approach I would say I really like this vision of saying ServiceNow is an application platform now as a service where we can build any application we want to so we have some applications on the baseline like in sales management, like change management, now customer services, like security operation. If we need to build other applications we can do it, the same way if we want to modify an application, we can do it as long as we follow the base practices.

It's something really nice to do with ServiceNow because all legacy products when you were trying to do something a little bit on the side, it didn't work anymore and was very out of grade. Here, with our customers it's actually nice to upgrade ServiceNow.

It's like when you work on science, you say, when I answer one question, I have 10 other questions rising up. I see the same thing with ServiceNow. When something is added on ServiceNow on the platform, then you have 10 more things to do because you have to improve again and again and again. Here what could we do? They probably have a lot of things to do with IOT. We can always improve a lot of things about how we work between citizen developers and professional developers.

I am a professional developer so I know about Javascript, about coding, about scripting, technical stuff, but need as well to have people who don't anything about it would just and test it by their business side of the things. I want to engage them more and more to do things, to start doing things and when they are stuck with something, they just say, "Okay, David, please come to us, please help us with this thing. Please finish up the polish part," and then we arrive. Those are the things I would like to improve to engage more and more and more the citizen developers.

I started using it in December 2011.

I think we've got one customer who had an outage once, or maybe twice. One was a mistake we did on an integration and not the fault of ServiceNow. Second one is that the personnel forgot to change some certificates, so the instance was working perfectly, but the customer said, "I have an outage here and why?" We looked at it and we say, "Did you do your work here?" "Oh shit! I have to do it now." Yeah, extremely nice. I never had any issue with ServiceNow.

We go through the smallest customers, probably have something like 30 people and the biggest ones probably have thousands of people using ServiceNow everyday.

It's working very nicely, with scalability. Again, scalability with number of people, but also different teams working on ServiceNow, different processes, different countries. You can work with people all over the world together because ServiceNow won't stop working at 9:00 in the evening for European time.

Extremely good. The latest incident I have registered on high support was last week and maybe it was extremely complex, extremely technical, but after maybe one hour or two hours they came back with an answer saying, "Yeah, David, please read the documentation because it explains there that what you're trying to do is not actually possible." They provides all the answers and explanation why it's not really good to do it.

It's different for each company because if you are already quite mature with your processes, if you have good communication on your team, if you are obvious approach of collaborating between people, it's extremely easy. It can take just weeks to do it. On the other side, if you had legacy processes, you customized the previous tools and if you don't have this collaboration approach with the different teams and if everyone says, "I know what I need. I need this and only this feature and I can't listen to you if you tell me otherwise."

In that case, it might take more time, not because of ServiceNow but because we need a chance to culture the company. We need to have a culture shift on the company to be able to go to the right direction on ServiceNow. Communication, marketing, intel or involvement, engagement with people. That's extremely important to do.

If you need more time to do, for example, user acceptance testing, if you say, "Well I'm not secure as a customer to go live now." "Okay, let's take one more week, two more weeks to test. We probably won't do anything, any new developments, just a sync," but at least you will be sure that your users know ServiceNow, they are ready for go live and will be smooth. That's the most important. You go live when it's smooth, and not when it will be hectic.

I have customers who use HP Service Manager, BMC Remedy or CA. Personally, I tried in 2011, I have tried to work on BMC Remedy for maybe two months. I didn't learn that much. When I had the opportunity to go on ServiceNow, I said, "Yes, let's try." It was very nice and I have also spent maybe two days on HP Service Manager and that was the two most boring days of my life.

Yeah, the only thing we have to say with customers who already have some product today, especially in ITSM, is don't implement what you have from BMC or HP in ServiceNow. When you do ServiceNow, you do the ServiceNow way, not the BMC or not the HP way. That's extremely important because that's where you can end up with something extremely complex, not only for the platform. The platform can manage it, the platform don't care. Technically it's possible. For the people, for the users, for the end users for the fulfillers, you want to do something simple.

For example, for one customer, a small customer like one Android people IT guys, small customer. They had on instant management they had three Android categories. When you do some ServiceNow implementations, the first implementation step, you have to review your processes and review the requirements. Be sure you have the right things in place and not the things you don't need. Yeah. I think if I have say three words about a good ServiceNow implementation, it's all about upgradabiity, because you have to upgrade every six months or every year so you need to think about the upgradability of your platform. You have to think about the performance and you have to think about the value.

If you request anything and if you are a customer and you ask me anything to me, I will tell you what is the justification. If you don't have any justification, I will tell you, "Well, I'm sorry. I can't do it." I'll go to the CS person, and the they will say, I want this feature and I will say, "Okay. You are the customer, I do whatever you need, but above that, you need a justification." That's extremely important.

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.

I think realistically, it helped us better our processes. It forced us into adopting best practices. We were in a bit of a tech island, and so we kind of do our own thing. To get everyone in the same system, behaving the same way, looking at work the same way, it helped bring everyone on the same page and to adopt better ITIL practices.

We're a few generations back, we're on Eureka. We've had some vendors initially help us out. We've been through about four different vendors over the three and a half years. Some of that code has been problematic for us. We're looking to get to the Geneva release. A lot of this social type computing is really interesting to us.

I'm going to a Hackathon today, and I'm looking at a "Like" feature for managers. Often in IT, we're not front and center of projects, we don't get the spotlight. When we do things that keep the system up and running for the users, no one sees that. We want to say, "Well we're doing the work in the system." Our managers can go look at that, like it, high five, that kind of thing. We're looking at that kind of Facebook style, or social media style, view into their work and actually interesting to deep diving into the data and showing what our stats are like.

We just did our three year renewal in January so about three and a half years from implementation to production.

We've never had it go down or connect. Most times people say ServiceNow is down, it's because our network isn't available, so it's typically not us. You can flip the WiFi on your phone and say, "Okay, that's not ServiceNow." It's been really good.

We've been pretty consistent from day one. We've used more and more modules, and as people are getting more comfortable with the platform, we're trying to tie more functionality into it, but it's been reasonable for what we're doing.

It's pretty good. I can say that for some things, obviously you can't know everything and we can't find everything, but they've been doing better and better with that. Usually, when I do ask a question, they're pretty good at saying, "Okay, well here's where to go," or, "Okay, that's legitimate. Here's how to solve it." It's usually within a week or two that our issues can be resolved. If they're not critical, it's reasonable for us.

There's a lot there, it's like Excel. You can go in any which direction and you got two different ways to do it or multiple ways of doing things. It was a steep learning curve for us. We went through a number of vendors until we were able to fish on our own. Now we can go to specific people and then get those targeted information. It's been really good for us to have the user groups, local user groups, the snugs, and pick the brains of other companies who are having the same challenges or working on the same projects we are. Then we can collaborate a little bit and make sure that we're doing what makes sense. It's not just us in our own little sandbox.

Definitely understand a bit about ITIL best practice and what that is. We had a gentleman come in about three months before ServiceNow was brought in. He actually ran a mock help desk scenario with business asking things and with the knowledge base being put in typical back end of the level two support. We played the game several times, reorienting where all the knowledge is, where their work was done, and all of a sudden, I had a bird's eye view of how work should be done. As we were implementing ServiceNow, all the decisions and all the modules we put in place laid out to support that foundation that we'd seen. Whereas our initial approach was let's just put in there blank for like all the systems that we have. We wouldn't have leveraged a lot the best practices and things that we'd seen in the game that would've really helped us out. We would've had to rebuild it after the fact. Really understanding, see where you want to be and then build the tool up from there.

The new developer tools with Geneva have been the most valuable so far. The community is really good too. There's not a lot of tools that I've been an administrator of where the community really helps out like ServiceNow’s does.

I'm not sure about additional features because really, if you need something, you can build it in ServiceNow so that's pretty neat in itself. Working out some of the things that people might have headaches about and for access to certain things in the workflow, like the delivery time and being able to set that dynamically on a request item would be nice. As far as new features, it looks like they're going the right direction. They have ideas that I haven't even thought of.

I've used it for a little over a year.

It has. With the new update in Geneva, there's a few snags with the presence, but they're getting that ironed out. As far as up-time goes, it's always been available.

We haven't needed to scale yet and right now our licenses aren't size-based as far as storage-based goes. I haven't really seen a need to scale at the moment.

Very good. I've worked with other vendors in the past that haven't been nearly as good as ServiceNow's, like CA technologies and SolarWinds. ServiceNow is way better.

I previously used CA UIM. CA didn't really know what was going on and a lot of the stuff they promised was really not working properly. They got us in the contract, though, so it's too late.

I wasn't at the company when the initial setup took place, so I can't really speak on that. As far as upgrades go, it's pretty straightforward. Doesn't take too long and generally goes smoothly.

We will eventually upgrade to Helsinki. I guess we can do it now if we wanted, but we just switched everybody from Fuji to Geneva and getting everybody used to that. The UI hasn't changed a whole lot, but one of the sessions coming up [at Knowledge 16] is the Helsinki features. I'm going to take a look and decide from there whether we should push it quicker or not.

I'd tell them to stay out of the box as much as possible. We've had it for quite a while, I think since 2005. Out of the box as much as possible because once you start developing and making stuff your own and then some cool new features come down the line. It makes a lot of work to look at backing out stuff so you can implement the new features from ServiceNow and then maybe eventually putting your stuff back in. Just stay out of the box as much as possible, alleviate headaches.