ServiceNow Reviews

I like the flexibility on ServiceNow. We use it for our help desk admin and our call center, but we also use it for our knowledge management system. Right now our knowledge management system is our growth area. We get to add our custom homemade apps plus some of the other vendor apps, to integrate into that to get our total package that we need. We have multiple enterprise applications so we're moving data back and forth between all of them all the time, so ServiceNow is great for that part.

Previously we used some other applications, some are homemade, some not, but as they updated the applications, they didn't keep up with how our actual strategy and how our organization worked with. So far we've been with ServiceNow for many years and every time they've had an update, it's been fairly seamless for us.

Somehow if there was a roadmap for ServiceNow to show all of the different business domains and everything and what may be included and what you have or what might could be upgraded to support you in those areas. Show me a roadmap and I'll look at different business processes and how ServiceNow would handle those.

We've only had network issues, and we've never had any latency issues. It's always just if the network is down is our only problem. We have had bugginess, but we're going to get too technical for me. It's part of the integration between ServiceNow and Genesis and IVR. There were some issues but they were very technical in nature.

The scalability is fine.

I don't have direct experience with them. I have six coordinators and two of them in particular work really well with ServiceNow. If they've had an issue or had a question, they've had it corrected, resolved fairly quickly.

I've used BMC Remedy which I hate, and the others were just homemade.

The complexity was not complex for ServiceNow, it was just wrapping our heads around it. We have over 120 different platforms and variations of those and we have probably 300 core sites, so to be able to pull together everything we wanted for our ticking system and to relate that with knowledge management was just a challenge for us to pull our process together.

You should look at ServiceNow and at the business processes. If a roadmap was available it would be very easy for you to choose one and implement that first, and as they go along pick up another one.

We have our own development groups so obviously we can customize stuff well, where others probably can't, so I prefer my custom apps, but if I take that away I'd probably give ServiceNow an eight and a half, or nine. I consider my custom apps probably seven and a half. I need to learn also how to integrate some of our custom apps to start working within ServiceNow and those too. That's a short fall in my experience.

I'd have to say it's the CMDB. When we first started our project it was a security focused project, and what we wanted to do was bring in all of the assets that we have on our network and know where they are and what they're connected to. That was one of the first things that we went live with in December 2015, and it was the big benefit right out of the gate, the CMDB and out of discovery.

We didn't really have a good handle on where our assets were, the state of them, what software was installed, things like that. We had a very disparate group, the telecom group had their spreadsheets, the Unix group had their MySQL database, the Intel team had their Windows Server database, and it wasn't in one location. This brought everything into a single location so we could see how our business applications were related to servers, switches, and firewalls.

From us it started with the security perspective, so we're a regulated utility, so we have requirements under various Federal guidelines, so we need to respond quickly to various CERT advisory, government advisories for security events. We needed to be able to determine what applications, what servers, what work stations had these issues that were in the CERT advisory and so we needed to respond to that quickly. That is the real business benefit for us right now for the product.

I would have to say that the documentation on the knowledge site can sometimes be very confusing.

They had suggestions for how we could do certain things, and I guess what I was expecting was ServiceNow to push - since ServiceNow can do so much. I can code it to do anything that I want, and so the issue was that they should have pushed back more and said, well, that really isn't how you should do it, you should do it this way. It was more, "OK that sounds good" and they let us do something that we shouldn't have done, and then it bit us, so we ended up having to come back and we ended up doing basically our own home-grown SDLC process in the system through requests, and we're on version 3.25 of that. It just took us three months longer than it did to implement change. It was a struggle.

We have. We implemented some various complex ACLs and they've impacted our performance significantly, and we've had several incidents open to help with performance, and it's been kind of a struggle to get the ServiceNow support group to say "Yup, I see it's a problem, let's do this." Eventually they say "Oh yeah, it is." They've upgraded our incidence, they've added indexes to certain tables and things like that, it's just been a struggle, two to three months of constant back and forth to get our performance and our production instance the way that we want it.

We only have about 250 users, so other than that we haven't rolled out it to our 5000 employees yet, that's going to be in August, and that's going to be for incident problem and knowledge. So far for IT it's OK, other than those slight performance issues that we've had.

We have not used a solution at all, so this was the first.

Honestly, if we wouldn't have gone as far outside the box as we did, it would have been really easy. Change was actually the easiest thing that we've done, and doing the configuration management stuff, the auto-discovery, I would say that we had a great approach. We decided to go discovery by class of device, Unix servers, Cisco switches things like that, and we had a 13 to 14 week process to go - it was like September, October we began, and in December we had our CMDB pretty much good to go with our 6500 servers, workstations, and Cisco devices and it was actually functional in December in about four months. Which according to ServiceNow, is a rare thing. Not a lot of people get it that complete within four months.

We actually had ServiceNow as our consultants. The way that the consultants at ServiceNow approached our implementation of change in request, we actually had to redo it a couple of times because there are so many different ways you can approach change in request items, in the catalogues themselves, that we ended up having to do two or three different redesigns to get to what we wanted. I guess I was kind of expecting when we implemented with ServiceNow that they would know the platform inside and out and they would have a "this is the way that you should do it", and that was actually kind of a shortcoming that I had in the implementation. That was kind of a shortcoming for us. Love the product, but it was just that the development phase was a rocky three months that we had.

It's a great platform but it's so open that you can get bogged down pretty quickly in trying to make all of your customers happy. I would stress try to keep it out of the box, vanilla as possible, and you'd actually be a little bit happier, let the system do what it's supposed to do. I really like it, I really, really do. There's a lot there. We've struggled on some things, but I think overall it's a great platform for our company.

The reporting capabilities, the consolidation of the data on the back end, and be ability to report everything because that's what everyone else sees, or what everyone wants to see is the numbers for their departments. Every end user pretty much has the same needs, regardless of what they're doing. They want to see the incidents assigned to their team with the KPIs are all there.

Before we had ServiceNow, the business processes across different groups were more fragmented. ServiceNow has helped to streamline the processes with other groups and brought them all together. They have a better idea of what's going on. It gives executives a better vision of what's going on in the company.

It's a very complex tool with a lot of different pieces and it takes a lot of different people to support it because everyone has to be specialized in their own piece. There is a little bit of trying to get all the executives to come to agreement on KPIs across the organization. It has been a little complicated, but it's not really specific to the tool, but we need that, before we can realize parts of the tool.

It's been very stable.

The only bugs we've had have been from internal data issues. There is no safety guards in place to check for the data before it's loaded within the product itself. I don't know if that's something that we just haven't developed that piece, or if it doesn't exist. Most of our issues have been related to this issue.

I think they were using HPE Service Manager, and I don't think they were using it to the extent that they're using ServiceNow, just a few components were turned on. I think it was just incident management so they weren't doing project management stuff and I don't think they were doing time tracking. They weren't fully utilizing it.

I wasn't in the group when they did the implementation around a year ago and they did have a third party vendor helping out. They did push back the live date probably six, or seven times, I know there was a lot of trouble with implementing it and they didn't turn everything on initially, it was just the vanilla version to begin with. I don't know what the issues were they ran into, I just know it took some time. It was complex.

I'd say do it in baby steps. Do incident management first, to make sure that you have a really good team that can support it before you expand it, and having a really clean CMDB.

Over the two years that we've had ServiceNow up and running, we've had a couple of service interruptions. Other than that, no. Some kind of network problem they were having, they had to fall back into a different data center, and that took about 15 minutes, I wish it was a little bit seamless, but we've had a couple of glitches.

The ability to add more users to the system itself, what we have done is we've linked it to our active directory, and that's where we're importing the user information from, and that's been working great for us.

Our company is basically a group of companies, it's not just one company, so our IT infrastructure and department and the way we operate is very fragmented. One of our goals is to combine them into one enterprise.

We are actually using about 26 different ITSM tools and we are in the process of eliminating them all. Over the past two years we have been able to get rid of five of them, and we're continually working towards off-lining the rest as well. The biggest one that we currently use is Maximal, I believe IBM uses that, that's who we deal with, and it's still there.

I wasn't with that company when they were implementing it, so I'm not exactly sure. As I was joining them, they were deploying their first module which was the incident module. Others have been very easy since I've been there, they did knowledge, they did change, and they developed a custom application, which after a little while ServiceNow provided free of charge, so that was kind of always, but we're still using the custom one. As far as deploying and developing goes within ServiceNow it's very easy, not painful at all. The only pain point for us is because we're a group of different companies, our collection of requirements is a little bit lengthy, it requires a little bit more work than other companies. The incident module itself alone is very complex because we have several service desks at several locations and fairly complicated.

I would advise you to stay out of the box as much as possible. I know it is very difficult to do that, but if you stay out of the box and go with minimum customization it would be the best, because when you upgrade to the next version, our next release or example, we will encounter issues if you have customized it, and you'll have to fix that. Also as far as testing goes, try to automate it. Because that's right now a challenge for us, a regression test.

• Change
• Incident
• Service Catalog
• Configuration Management
• Project Portfolio Management
• Knowledge Base

• Improved the globalization of processes and around the clock service delivery to our customers
• Automated repetitive tasks and shifted left simple tasks to the service desk

• Lots of customizations can lead to breaking the system when moving to another release. This should be managed better by ServiceNow
• UI can be busy and complicated for non-IT users
• Difficulty in debugging and testing code output

I've used it for five years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

8/10

8/10

We used a different product, and switched because it was easier to set up and customize to the needs of our business compared to its competition.

A bit of both. It involved more customizations/work than we initially assumed.

Both. Have a dedicated resource(s) from in house that works with the vendor in developing and setting ServiceNow Modules/Applications. It's very important to use an experienced vendor team that has dealt with complexities in implementing a ServiceNow environment. You should also have clear functional requirements/functional specifications from the beginning before any ServiceNow development is done.

As a technical specialist, the features that are most valuable to me are:

• Facility for doing customizations
• Very quick time to business
• Good support
• Availability time
• Some nice development tools
• Facilities for building integration

At the moment, we have implemented Incident, Problem, Change, Catalog and a bit of Asset Management. As we had a terrible system before ServiceNow, we did not have any kind of KPIs. Now we have all the processes integrated between each other and with some good KPIs.

The number of improvements is big, but we are still doing changes on the platform so we can get even more. At this point, we have already done almost 1000 stories (each story represents a change) with improvements.

They improved, a bit, the Reporting part of the product, but for sure it could be improved a lot more. I think they also should re-think the way they license the tool because it’s too expensive to automate all of your business, but you’ll need lots of licenses. If they did this, it would be an awesome tool. People go for doing some dirty integrations (with JIRA for example) just to reduce the number of licenses needed in ServiceNow.

I worked for a ServiceNow partner for some years before being a client. As a client, I have used the solution for one-and-a-half years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

I really like it. They answer quite fast and provide good solutions.

It was straightforward because we had a clear idea of what processes we were implementing and how they would be (Workflow). The complex part of it is basically map your processes; implementing the tool is the easy part.

At my current company, we did it with ServiceNow and in-house (me). But I worked at a ServiceNow Partner before, and I would strongly recommend a vendor implementation unless you already have some experts in-house.

We did an extensive evaluation to choose this product. It’s confidential and I cannot give details of it.

As a technical specialist, I can see that the product is really good and has lots of enhancements with each version. It’s a really good (but expensive) product. As it’s very easy to customize, it’s also easy to break it. I would recommend just to have a really good specialist (who knows some of the business as well) and it should be pretty straightforward to succeed.

I'm in the public service sector, and it is used for public services. 

In terms of deployment, you normally buy ServiceNow on the cloud. You can also have it on-prem, but they're not very keen on giving you that option. So, more often, it is on the cloud, which is very difficult for my type of clients who are not based in America because ServiceNow Cloud is all on American hyperscalers.

It is important to route a ticket or service request to the right person. It needs to adhere to various standards, and ServiceNow is a very good product in this domain.

It is a very promising product. They have a new release every six months. They're investing quite a lot, and you can do many creative things with the product. If you know how it works, you can have stricter rules in the product.

Their user interface is old-fashioned and outdated, and it can be more friendly for the eye. They can improve the user experience.

We should be able to have different UI frameworks. Currently, they only do Angular, and sometimes, you can do React, but they can be more open-minded in this regard.

They are quite good in case management, but they can work more on case management. They can also adhere more to BPMN 2.0.

You need to know how to use it. You need to do a scope application. If you have everything on the same table, it gets slow. You need to know how the product works, and you need to adhere to the rules. Otherwise, it would become slow.

They have third parties that have competencies. It is not so easy to interact directly with the vendor because they have outsourced to their service partners and integration partners who know what to do. You also have communities taking your questions, but you mostly rely on the implementation partners. Other vendors have also followed the same approach where they produce the platform, and sub-parties produce the service.

It is quite straightforward, but you need an expert. It is a specialized tool.

The product is very good. They are growing a lot, and it seems that for them, it is about what to do first. Everyone wants to talk to them, and they are good, especially in the field of service processes and case management. I like them, but they're difficult to work with because they're very busy.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.

We use it for ticketing.

We haven't been using it long enough for me to say how it has improved our organization.

Creating a ticket is much simpler in this tool. That is one big advantage. Also, the simplicity and ease of use are much better. I've used HPSM and it is very complex in comparison to ServiceNow.

Change Management is the area I have found that this tool can be improved because there are so many fields which are missing, such as urgency of the customer request and how the priority is defined. These are some of the areas in which I found that BMC Remedy is much better than ServiceNow.

I haven't found many stability issues in this tool. The uptime is relatively good.

Scalability is not a big issue for this tool. It's good.

Technical support is an eight out of ten.

I was not part of the team or a decision maker for using this tool. I am an end user. It was purchased by our organization.

Other tools I have used and evaluated are BMC Remedy vs ServiceNow and Micro Focus Service Manager vs ServiceNow.

I would recommend looking into all aspects of ticketing tools and I would advise people to use BMC Remedy because of the scalability and the features available. If you are not very technical then I would recommend ServiceNow.

Most of the users of ServiceNow in our company are Level 1 and Level 2 engineers, and some of them are problem managers. We have more than 200 people using the tool.

I would rate ServiceNow at eight out of ten. The two points off are for some features which are not there in Change Management and in the ITSM software. The rating is as high as it is because of its simplicity and ease of use.