ServiceNow Reviews

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.

The most valuable feature by far of ServiceNow is the rapid development. How quickly you can actually go out and change things, adapt things, ready to fulfill the business needs.

One of the things that we're trying to figure out is how ServiceNow can be more of a platform to be used as a backend. Because of the rapid development, it can barely oversee it for use at the back end. We're having discussions right now to actually understand what that will mean. The other piece is some of the UI's are currently being restricted from not having too much customizations. That puts us in a tough spot. Sometimes there are some corner cases where some people want something and we kind of change it. Those are mostly with new UI's. There's good reasons for actually locking those down. At the same time, it problematic for us.

I have been using personally ServiceNow for about five years.

Best in class. It has been really good; it's availability, reliability, performance. Sometimes people do dumb stuff with scripts. The performance is not the platform's problem, the problem is with peoples scripts.

It scales well.

It's great. I'm part of the ServiceNow community, so that helps for support. Their support works great - they are really helpful, they have the indicators and all the right stuff for closing tickets really quickly and they also put first resolving your issue. It's really great support.

We used to use different solutions. Some of it was kind home-grown. Nothing similar to ServiceNow from as a platform perspective.

It's already set up, you just have to work it out according to your needs. Just like in any other project, you need to understand your process, you need to understand how you need to improve your process. Don't automate the problem. Just like any other process, the recommendation is you either work with ServiceNow or you're work with a technology partner. I'm a technology partner and we help others with those types of things. It's really straightforward.

Integration - we started off at ITIL processes, but now we're looking at integrating it with other aspects of our business. We're on-boarding CMDBs so that we know what we have. On the other side of that, we can tie those into those processes that we already have so that we can actually see incidents across which devices or if there were changes made to those devices that correlated back to those incidents and stuff like that.

More out of the box stuff, but then again it's so customizable that you can make it do what you need it to do even if it didn't come with it.

I've used it for a little bit short of a year. My company has used it for four years.

It's been constantly stable. I wouldn't say never any down time, but I would say that we're usually at four nines.

I would say most certainly it's scaleable.

With my interactions with them, I would say that they're really good. I almost never have to escalate anything. It's usually the person that responds to me helps me out pretty quick.

Upgrades can be kind of painful. ServiceNow is a great product because you can do almost anything with it. On the flip side of that, it's kind of horrible because you can do almost anything with it. The more you customize stuff, the more effort there is in upgrading to see what isn't getting upgraded because you've customized it and then to work out what you have to do.

My advice would be to do it, not knowing obviously what their ITIL processes are beforehand. I would say, "Get ready to ride the roller coaster," because, like I said before, you can do almost anything with it, which is also a downfall because when we started we were doing just incident change and problem. Now we're doing incident change, problem, project, self-service portal, CMDB discovery, service mapping, even management. It grows exponentially. You have to try to keep up with all those pieces.

The ability to manipulate or customize all of the underlying structure.

That's a really hard question because their target audience is so diverse. They've got everything from medical to university and everything in-between. For me personally, I would say all these new features, these new things that they're doing are awesome, but I want documentation on what they're doing on the underside, what they're doing behind the scenes. I think I'm honestly in the minority with that. I think most people want to just get some admins and have them be able to do everything that a developer can do. I would say as far as marketing or sales, I would say they're probably going in the right direction. Enabling the admins to do more and more and more, while locking down, so they don't muck around and screw stuff up.

I've used it for four years.

It doesn't crash. They have a terrific up time, but I would expect that when you have four redundancies, that goes without saying. I would say that for the things that I like to do, which is muck around in the underlying, I would say that it's going downhill.

The most recently released Geneva locked up a bunch of stuff. A good example is UI16. There's a bunch of stuff that's undocumented and it's locked away. It makes it very hard to get to. I would say that's a definite negative.

As far as I'm aware, it scales beautifully. You just throw another stack or two or 20 at it and off you go. We make a lot of custom apps, custom modules, which is why I muck around in the underside. As far as that goes, for scalability the sky is the limit.

They're a funny group. I've never had a ticket that I've submitted to support that was answered by the initial person that received it. It usually ends up going to their tier two or in some cases, the developer. I don't know how to answer that question because the questions I ask are very hard. I've been doing it for a long time. I'm sure that the support team is fantastic for someone that's new to the product or hasn't used it before but for me it's a bit of a rigmarole.

Actually, it's very complex. Usually, you're doing it with a partner. Most institutions have partnered with someone to help them with an implementation. How well it goes is usually on the implementation engineer or their team's shoulders. I have gone through an implementation that was just horrific and we made it work. I've seen implementations that go fantastic. You just turn a key and there it goes. I would say it really depends on the quality of your implementation engineer.

I would ask about the use case. What are you trying to solve? What are you trying to do? Then I would advise based on their feedback provided and their budget. Some budgets are very small and I don't know if they would work with this solution.

In my role it would be Demand and Project because I'm a project manager.

I attended some of the sessions about Helsinki and I think some might be addressed there - reporting and Gantt charts. Calendar views - there are no nice calendar views and I think I'm just starting to learn about resource management but it would be nice for them to have the roadmaps so you can see an actual calendar view to see where from a project, (not necessarily resource but project) wear you are. Calendar views would be a huge addition.

Our company's been using it about two years, myself I've been using it about a year and a half.

No downtime that I know of.

It's a scalable product and we see it scaling for us.

I haven't been involved a lot with the support. I think that's going to change and I think I will get involved more but for right now I don't know that we've had issues. I haven't heard of any so I'm assuming we haven't.

I'll go out on the Wiki and look for answers and I might jump over to the community to try to find information.

For the first portion of it, I know we had a lot of internal change management so it took a little bit longer but they rolled it out all at once. I think it took about six months but I wasn't here for that. We rolled out Project and Demand and we did it in two months.

Go for it. I actually said that to someone who's nervous about doing it. Get everybody on it, don't do it piecemeal.

One of the gals that did a presentation [at Knowledge 16] said they're using demand and project but still using Microsoft Project. Don't do that, put it all in Servicenow. Even though it may be a little clunky in certain places, it helps to have one tool and everything in one place.