ServiceNow Reviews

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.

ServiceNow is such a broad framework that you can basically touch upon any improvement that you want to do in your company. Whether it's financial, healthcare or HR related. I think you can use your imagination to build anything that you want to improve. I think that's the greatest power of ServiceNow - it's basically a generic optimization too.

What I really like is that it's going a bit away from purely IT but it allows you to compose a service catalog or an asset database. That can be the basis of purchasing, request performance or validation. For example for healthcare, you load all the assets of technical healthcare systems into ACNB database which can be used to find out which hospitals have an MRI machine available.

You can go in all kinds of directions and I think that's what is most powerful. They use mechanisms to attract people to the system. I think the user experience is improving so fast, they use the example a system of record and system of engagement. I think it's exactly that. It attracts people that normally wouldn't have so much interest in a system like this but because it communicates a bit like WhatsApp it appeals much more to what they like to do. Then I think the biggest step of implementing such things is not the imagination of knowing what to design, what to develop but how to implement it in an organization. I think that's the biggest step, basically changing your organization to adapt to the new functionality or the new way of working you want to introduce. I think that for companies it's the most difficult aspect.

Architects and solution designers can come up with the greatest things but more complex organizations cannot just be blended into an ideal model. There's always contradicting stakeholders especially in the field of service management. I'm doing an assignment with a large bank and their service management belongs the service management department. The IT company that does the nominal incident resolution for us feel responsible for service management. We have a security and compliance department who feels responsible for service management. We have a functional support department that feels responsible for service management. Everybody has an opinion on service management, everybody has an opinion on CMDB. If you want to change something with a great idea, they have to get all those people on board to get the decision made and then to have it implemented. I think that is the tricky bit and that's what you don't hear all the time.

Well the funny thing is that we develop based on ServiceNow and you see a lot of apps being made. I think whenever you see shortfalls or improvement opportunities for ServiceNow that are being built by third party companies, the next release of ServiceNow includes it all. There must be aspects that are currently not there in ServiceNow and my bet is that it will be there next year. That's difficult for development guys like us but on the other hand it makes the product stronger all the time.

What I'd like to see is the fact that Performance Analytics should be a stand-alone reporting tool, and allow you to drag and drop within the data cubes or the dimensions in the data model. Let's say I want this on the y-axis and I want this on the x or I want this in this in this kind of graph. You can throw around with the fields and immediately you see the graphs being populated. I think from a customer point of view, they should be able to be in the power to have their idea created right there on the spot and not being dependent on an implementer who comes and does this consulting for them. I saw good examples in BMC which I haven't seen on Performance Analytics but they just bought the products, they're just expanding on that. What I see is that companies sometimes use an external tool for presenting dashboards to customers, like Numerify or Grafana or this 3rd-party dashboarding solutions. I think it's a waste if ServiceNow is not able to keep those customers on-board.

I think ServiceNow can improve more towards the customer to allow them to do that themselves. If they implemented some frameworking, set it up for you and then say, "Okay, this is what you can do and this is the freedom you'll get." Then you can throw or you can toss around with the data in any way you would like.

On the platform, on the framework called ServiceNow there's all kinds of interacting systems like SAP and Oracle. I think what you see is that maybe SAP will not be needed that much anymore in five years from now because a lot of functionality that a company needs is offered through the platform called ServiceNow.

I don't know where that's going to end because at some point ServiceNow will become a marlock and people will turn away from a 'one solution fits all' and go more into the niches again. I don't know where it's going to end. Until now I think it looks very promising and yeah, I think very much appealing to most customers.

We have used it only for a couple of months because we're a start-up. Personally, I've used it a little over a year.

One of our partners is the technical guy, he's developing now on the development instance.

The only thing I can come up with is the fact that we ordered an instance with domain separation or activated that wasn't there from the scratch. We had to raise an incidence and to get it resolved and stuff. You know that it takes you one or two weeks and then everything is done and then it's passed to you.

We used a solution from HP.

Out-of-the-box stuff is very easy to deploy but when you have specific demands then maybe of course it is more complex. For us it was quite easy because we had a developer instance already so we developed most of our products in that instance. We couldn't get stuff like the domain separation completely functionally the way we wanted it. We could develop already, so when we purchased our instance I think it took us 2 - 3 weeks to get everything up and running.

I would definitely advise you to transition into ServiceNow because I've seen comparisons with the BMC Projects which is a lot more expensive. I haven't seen any functionality that I would really like except maybe for some Performance Analytics functionality that is more user friendly than what I saw.

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.

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.