ServiceNow Reviews

I would say the ability to create applications that follow a standard workflow as well as record producers. We handle a lot of requests from our entire university. The biggest thing is giving our users a service catalog with a bunch of simple items, most of them are record producers, some of them need a workflow, just allowing them to go in and very simply submit request. For us that's probably the most valuable feature.

They've gotten to a pretty good place with where they are right now. I think a lot of it is going to be that citizen developer, making things a little bit easier to interface with. I really like the new rest messaging they put in there that allows for much easier integrations. I like most of the new application stuff and the IDE. I'd say from here, just smoothing out that whole IDE development process, making it easier to make changes to global in the IDE if that's where they really want us. Some improvements are probably needed there but I don't have anything massive on my list that ServiceNow needs to do.

I've personally used it for about four years.

I had no issues. When there is potential for a downtime, they always email me and let me know. Even when I get those emails, I've experienced mild hiccups but beyond that, I've never been locked out for more than maybe 30 seconds in 4 years.

When we started, we had about 35-40 IT folks inside of ServiceNow, plus probably about a thousand end-users logging in for self-service. Now we've probably about quadrupled that at this point and run into very little snags. I would say the biggest thing with scalability for us from a ServiceNow perspective is just make sure your user data matches whatever you're using elsewhere. We use single sign on and we need to make sure that the user data in ServiceNow matches that so that users can actually get in when they're supposed to get in.

It's mostly good. I would say there had been times where it's taking a long time for a resolution. Sometimes that's probably just due to the fact that whatever I'm submitting is not that important. I'll happily admit that.

I've had some issues that have taken four to five months to get fixed. Again, we're not talking the show stoppers. When I needed something, I've had probably two cases in the last few years where it's just been absolutely integral, like I'd get an answer right now. They were pretty good in those situations.

I would tell you that for me and for what our business uses, I highly recommend it, but that you should look at their business case and see if you need a product as fully-featured as ServiceNow is because it comes at a cost. Depending on what your needs are, it's possible to look at other products. There are a lot of similar products out there. ServiceNow is probably not the cheapest but if you have a specific set of needs particularly the ease of building applications, request forms, stuff I mentioned earlier, I think it's the best product on the market.

I like the adaptability and the flexibility of the tool. We've had a number of ideas, "Hey, I wish there was a way we could do this." and "Oh, well, let's make that happen." Then very quickly we were able to figure out a way to make it work and now there's a way we can make that happen. That's the best thing about it.

I think the biggest thing that I've seen is when we've moved to the knowledge-based version three, which happened relatively recently, there were a lot of new improvements that came with that, but there were a lot of things that actually seemed like a little bit of a step back. What we're hoping is that some of that's just like, "We wanted to present you with this new tool and we're going to add some of these things back in later on." There's a lot of the flexibility that we've come to expect from ServiceNow that seem to be gone in that new version.

I've personally used it for about three years.

We have the occasional problems with slowness, but I can't remember a single instance where it's been completely down.

For the foreseeable future, I think it's what we're going to stick with.

The support's been excellent. Our local rep has been excellent and I haven't personally reached out to technical support or anything, but I have been using the community and that's been great to have. The Wikis is an excellent resource so there's a lot of resources out there.

I wasn't there in our initial setup but our upgrades have been relatively painless.

I would absolutely recommend it. We're a little bit of a unique case in a lot of ways because we were on ServiceNow a couple years ago and we actually moved away from it, because we're running Salesforce for the rest of our university for case management. There was a mandate that we wanted everything to be in Salesforce, so we actually moved away from ServiceNow to Remedyforce. It was a disaster and about a year later we moved back to ServiceNow. I think it's an interesting demonstration of the fact that it's such a good product that even after we moved away from it we came back.

A lot of pain and tears went into that migration. We didn't really want to do another migration eight months later, but it was so worth it to do it. It's absolutely worth the investment of time and effort to do it.

It's ease of use, extensibility and just the ability to take it out of the box and use it with minimal custom configuration.

The documentation needs work. The wiki is woefully inadequate. I support federal customers, there's a separate US government approval process to use instances, and we're behind the rest of the public community. For instance, we don't even have permission to use Geneva yet, and Helsinki is already out. I know they're working on it and it's going to be faster, but right now it's a challenge. You see all these new features and we can't go out and use them until the government says we can.

I've been using it since 2009.

We've had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scaler for our needs.

They're inconsistent. Depending on who you get, they may or may not be able to immediately provide the kind of response you need and sometimes they take a while to do it.

I wouldn't say that I use the community a lot. I think our developers do, and I'm not a developer. They go out and use it more than I do.

It was easy to set up.

I would recommend it. I think the biggest challenge with all of the functionality that exists in ServiceNow today is to figure out where to start, and having a narrow strategy so that when you do buy it you don't try to do everything at once and get nothing done. A lot of the sessions around here [at Knowledge16] have done a good job in outlining that and driving their experience. I definitely recommend it.

It's very easy to customize and build off of. It's a simple platform to get up to speed on. Every company I've worked for has enjoyed their idle focus. The usability is a valuable feature, a lot of customers just enjoy the usability of it.

Since I've been working with the product for a long time, it feel like in the old days it was kind of a smaller, cult-like following. You had a more family-like community. Now it's gotten so big and it's kind of lost a little bit of that. I guess that's good for their business.

They seem to be trying to branch out and do a lot more than just ITSM which is usually what the core focus is, so sometimes there might be a little bit less emphasis on that. Personally I haven't seen that, but other people have mentioned it. It'll be interesting if they try to be all things to all people. They've gotten more polished, more professional, larger and a lot more sales-oriented when they went public. I don't really have many bad things to say about them.

I've personally used it since 2007. I worked at a company called Progress Energy. It was in Raleigh, North Carolina. They were an early adopter and we luckily fell into it at the right time.

It was never bad, but in the early days there was definitely more outages, and we had an SLA. I think initially we even got some money back from them in the early early days in Progress. I'd say over the past five years or so that the reliability's been excellent.

I've had no issues with scaling, especially in the last five years. Availability seems to really have helped. We still have some performance issues, but sometimes those could be network related and not vendor related. Sometimes it's our development which is causing the trouble. I would not blame ServiceNow for any kind of performance issues that we've had.

Currently, we're not really scaled up at this particular point, so I don't foresee that being an issue, but we could encounter that later.

I'd say it's fairly good. The bigger they've got, the more I guess standardized their high systems become. Usually if we have something that really shows up on our radar, we can get a hold of somebody and get it addressed. In the earlier days when we had more of those, we also had pretty good luck at being able to get some senior engineers on problems that we had, even if they were self-inflicted problems.

We've used ServiceNow professional services and I've really enjoyed working with them and some of the other high-level partners, but to be honest with you, my current company isn't big on contractors. It's kind of an act of parliament to get them to bring somebody in from outside.

Being more technical myself, would say that having a clear and consistent view of your requirements, what you want to do, and to try to stay out of the box at first as much as possible. This is the third company I've worked for who uses ServiceNow and we always try to over-customize it at first, because everybody has very defined processes. Over-customization of the tool will hamstring you in how you can take advantage of stuff that they release. They always seem to release something that you're wanting to build right after you build it.

It's been a challenge because a lot of people think they know better, and everybody does it their own way. Staying out of the box initially is really helpful. Any tool can be made bad if you put garbage in. That's the biggest issue I've seen.

From my standpoint, it's the process flexibility. We're at a really low maturity level, especially for the age of our company - we're about fourteen years old. From a service and support standpoint we're still in that one maturity level, idol-wise. It's been a blessing with ServiceNow to be able to nail down our various business processes. The support ones we weren't working and they were all over the place. 

ServiceNow was need to get everyone working the same way through tickets and requests. The ability to have something consistently flexible enough for us to put some structure in and get folks all working the same way across multiple departments, but still have the flexibility for them to feel like they're getting what they want when they're getting what we want.

We're anxiously awaiting setting up Helsinki for the health service portal. I think we were originally Fuji, and we did some custom branding and it was a nightmare. Designers got involved and it made it horrible. We've gone back to stock because we had seen what's coming with Helsinki. That's what I'm looking forward to with the customization.

We've been using it about a year and half now. My role is mostly as a sys admin and some development of the forms, requests and business rules.

Rock solid. We have a dev instance where only a couple of us work in development of a few things and ideas. Then in our production instance we do not yet have a mid-server or anything implemented. We're about to, but we are integrated with Centrify for some of the sign-on. From our support desk folks, it's been solid for them. Everybody gets what they needs. It's one of the things in our organization that always works.

I don't see it really being an issue. We probably have 80 odd idol license users from about 10 or 12 actual support desk folks, but there's also some folks doing project management and ERP. We have 3,500 odd employees, but they're not all going to be licensed users. We've got a lot of support corporate users. Scalability hasn't been an issue and I don't see it being one.

Very straightforward. It's almost point-click-done. You have to think a little bit, but that's mostly planning.

I recommend it to anyone to do any service management. 

Immediate insight into reporting. For us it's about trying to wrap our heads around the volume of tickets that are coming in the door. How quickly we're getting our turn time done? Those were things that were missing from our incident management platform. We could basically do a data dump once a week, dump that into an Excel spreadsheet, then do some computation on the side, and get those numbers out.

With ServiceNow, we're able to generate those reports daily. We can get that feedback almost immediately. We just started turning on performance analytics as well. That's one of the reasons I'm here [at Knowledge16], is to take the courses to learn more about performance analytics. We're really looking forward to that, to get it in more real time, and provide dashboards.

It was all on Fuji. Some of the things I'm going to say might already be in Geneva and Helsinki. We use a zipper product for our project management portfolio, demand management and resource planning. From what I have heard, and what I've seen thus far, resource management needs to be a little tighter. We're running performance models around capacity planning. We need to know: How many resources are in play? How many hours are they actually working? What's the requirement for all those resources on those different pieces? How does that lay against what we're allocating?

I can't have resources available for 45 hours a week, and then deploy them against 60 hours, and they only turn in 37 hours. The resource planner we have today actually calls out those discrepancies. I'm hoping that with performance analytics this will too. I haven't seen a lot of that in play yet because I think it's still fairly new for them. I think if you're going to run your IT shop like a business, you really need that kind of insight.

The other thing we do is we report out against three different modalities in our IT shop. 1. You got to run the shop. 2. You've got to maintain the business to keep the doors open. 3. You got to grow the business. There's some fancy math that you have to do against what people are doing, and how they're deploying their time to roll that back into one of those three categories. With the current system we have, there's a way of doing data masking and manipulating it so that way you can form these common buckets. I don't know that this will do that, I hope it will.

With ServiceNow, you have to do a lot of manipulation ahead of time to get to what that end state is. That said, coming to the conference and playing with Geneva, and playing with Helsinki, I've got a slightly different opinion. I'm pushing my guys to move from Fuji directly to Helsinki. Just because it does allow me to set those records up the way I want to quickly, as opposed to playing with the report to get that structure right. The only way I can describe it is, if you really enjoy building formulas, and data drops, and pivot tables, and having all that, and then analyzing the data, Fuji is great. Excel is also great for that, but it's not what I want to do. I want to actually analyze the data.

I've been using it about six months.

It's one of the few systems we have in our house that hasn't gone down. It's very stable. As a matter of fact, we don't even put it on our availability list because it's up.

We're currently on the Fuji release. There's some other things that we want to do like Demand Management and PMO they're coming out with in Geneva and Helsinki. It's one of the reasons we're here at the conference is to see if it will be scalable to those processes as well. From what I've seen thus far, it's pretty scalable.

To be honest, we have mostly in-house support. Anytime I've had a call or a question, it's been answered usually within a few days. Most of what we're looking for is just how do we get the right data. Our guys are able to go back to the system analysts, and get that information out, and then tell me which field to put in the report. It's a fairly quick turnaround.

We were using a competitor product at the time. It was from our corporate office. We brought a real sharp guy in from NetApp. He had used the ServiceNow platform for about half a decade. He's been to just about every conference. He was bragging about the fact that he was at the Knowledge 2011. He's a pretty sharp guy. He brought it to our attention, and then helped implement it. We tease him and say that maybe he's brought a lot of his bad habits from the other companies into this one too. Along with some of our bad habits from CA, which is us poking fun at the customization. He really does know the product inside and out, and we're lucky to have him.

To be honest, I wasn't involved a whole lot with the initial setup. At that point, I was in the PMO. I was watching it get executed as a project. It was a fairly quick project. I think we implemented six or seven of the modules that are out there reporting incident management etc. We were up and running in about two to three months.

Now that said, there's always the PMO side of the house where I got to look at it and go, "Did we get all the requirements?" I think we did it more agile. We're still finding things that we'd like to do different. Things we'd like to change now that it's up and running. Getting it up and out of the box is really quick. We did some customization which was really quick too.

Go ahead and get it. You'll have a cleaner insight into your organization, and how it's really working. You're going to do a little fighting with your groups if they're not already doing careful time tracking. ServiceNow is based at the task level. They assume that they are going to give you a task. That task has some time collateral associated with it. That tells you how long you're spending on certain things.

You have better insight into those tasks, better insight into how that time is being deployed. If your organization isn't already doing that, you're going to have a little bit of a culture shift. If that's where you want to go, if you want to transfer your business from "Trust us, we'll just get it done," to "I can actually demonstrate how we're doing it." ServiceNow is the right product for you.

I would say Fuji is about a 7, and what I was playing with the other day in the labs is probably about an 8 or a 9. It's a great product. I like where they're road mapping it. They have a very clear plan, and where they're going next. That's pretty exciting. We'll keep the product in-house for a couple of years.

I like the out of the box module processes like the incident problem change. Currently, I think the most powerful features are discovery, orchestration, the business map of the relationships, and building applications for business. The business applications has been in place for a year, and we have new customers, so we want to make business applications not only for IT but for other departments in the company.

With it, I can do everything. I have some questions, requirements, from the customers. I never say to the customer, "I can't do it." That's because I can do everything, so I think only our imagination can be the limit of ServiceNow. Even if something doesn't work now, I know that in the next few months it will.

From the customer perspective, I think the most important aspect is that they know what they're paying for. They pay once a year which makes it easy to plan financially. They know the costs of using ServiceNow, because you don't need extra resources, servers, backups etc. as everything is in the cloud.

From my perspective as a partner, I can do everything with ServiceNow so I don't stress about telling a customer during a meeting that I can do something even if I think I can't. Everything is possible and it's only limited by the imagination of myself and the developers.

I think that it goes too fast sometimes and they have too many releases too often. Sometimes there are bugs, maybe not making it unstable, but we need to change some customer customizations. For example, there are problems with the performance, so if ServiceNow is changing something such as data centers there can be issues. Availability is perfect of this platform. Genius, as I said at the beginning.

The only bugs are related to the configuration, not from the ServiceNow side, but from the partners that are doing something because they don't understand how it works.

It's small issues. Not a big impact for production instances and for the current work.

I worked with HP Service Manager. I know that BMC Remedy is quite similar in functionality to ServiceNow. They are trying to be in the same space but with HP Service Manager, I know there is a problem. For example, my previous company decided to go forward with ServiceNow as it had a service catalog. The Service Catalog functionality wasn't working in HP Service Manager, so they decided to switch to ServiceNow.

It depends. From my perspective, it's easy, I am a system architect, and I think from a customer perspective it's easy as well. I can see a new custom application created in a simpler way, for building applications, etc. but I'm usually only using the basic functionality, which I started to work with at the beginning because it's easier and I know that I can control it. From the user perspective, I can see that they are adding new forms to configure everything.

It's genius and there is no risk from the IT manager perspective. The management team of a company isn't at risk either and the future is always promising.

You can be sure that if you invest in ServiceNow the entire company will be happy. Always have a good partner to develop the instance and everything will be fine. For IT management, it's not risky to experiment with ServiceNow.

I would give it a ten. It's the best, from my perspective, especially compared with the IT systems I've worked with before.

The single record system, that you have all the data in one platform you can use and bind a lot of applications for different topics - that's very cool. It's also easy to use for the customers. Everybody knows what to do and where to click. You can try it and it's very fast. An example is incident application and of course, the Service Catalog, if you have a problem with the service catalog or a workflow, then you can open an incident.

ServiceNow is easier than existing systems, for example, HP Service Center. It's easier to use and every user wants to have it as simple as possible. If it's simple, you can work faster with it.

You can use standard functionality like add a wall to a group and then the user gets to sign and everything's fine. You can create ACL's, that's also good. If you like to split the users or the rights, what a user can do, then there are less walls. If you want to develop very quickly with ServiceNow, then you need the admin wall. If you have a lot of users, a lot of developers on a single platform, probably not everybody knows what the other ones do and you have, of course, different quality and experience of the developers. It's very fast to develop or change something that has a large impact on another solution. ServiceNow should provide a better kind of developer wall or something similar, whereby developers have a lot of rights. You're not the admin but can do and change everything.

We've been using it for around five years.

Deployment is specific to us because we have an on-premise installation. We have different servers and different security zones. The out-of-the-box functionality to retrieve an updates ad, for example, it's very nice and easy to use. It's okay, but if you're in different security zones in your infrastructure, then it's a little bit harder. It depends on how the developer know ServiceNow and how the process is defined. It's not a problem of ServiceNow.

There have been issues because of our customer as they wanted an on-premise installation. It's different than cloud solution. Stability is not a problem now. If there was a problem, then it was an infrastructure problem, not a problem of ServiceNow.

We are also using HP Service Center. We are consultants of it, and HP Service Center is also a good product. It depends on what the customer needs and how the customer wants to customize as to which solution they are offered.

ServiceNow is faster, easier to use, and configure. Also, if you have customizations you can use a lot of out-of-the-box features of ServiceNow and it's really simple to change something.

Depends on the requirements, of course. It was easy. It was good to develop something. If you try to use out-of-the-box functionality and your customer likes it, then it's okay. We also have huge and complex customizations, but they are working.

You should take the administration training and also the implementation specialist, and bring someone in. The best thing is if you have experience, since if you change something or see and do it by yourself, then you understand the whole system and how ServiceNow works.You understand what is the big advantage of the different configuration possibilities. If someone doesn't like to write code or JavaScript it's OK as you can use the configuration, but you need to understand what ServiceNow is, and how ServiceNow works.