ServiceNow Reviews

The flexibility of the platform, being able to modify forms or modify workflow, building applications, utilizing basics that they've given you and being able to expand them to adapt to your own personal environment. Everybody says that "This isn't how ITIL works" or "You shouldn't be doing this." I'm like, "But ITIL is a framework, that's the whole point of it" so that you can ingest what you need within your environment. The product is malleable. You can change it around to do what you need to do. If you need certain configuration items or certain categories or certain subcategories, you can make it work for your environment.

I think the value comes from centralizing processes across business units. I've seen it where we started in IT and then we've brought in teams like library functions or secretarial support, security auditing for cybersecurity needs, making sure that your meeting a new type of governmental regulations, and things of that nature. I think it's not about just utilizing it in one particular business area. It's something that can be used across departments and I think that's what's best about it.

I think that the product has grown considerably over the last few years. Initially, I had some issues with just ease of use. I was on Fuji before I started at my current employer. I came in and they're on Geneva. Between Fuji and Geneva, it's just total rework of just the way that the UI looks. I think it's more appealing to the eye. I think that it is easier to use than it used to be. A lot of the having to code and having to know how to use java and all that kind of stuff just wasn't as easy for us non-coding type of individuals. Now that you have like the little point and click and more non-coding development, it's much better.

I think more progression like on the visual task boards. There are some things that are there that seem a little quirky. If you want to move something to a visual task board and when you go into it, it can't really update it in the fashion that I would like to see. You have to click on the number and then it opens up another form. I think a little easier updating processes to their visual task board.

I think a little bit more ease of when you're using the email flow. If I'm emailing something into the primary email address for ServiceNow that it could parse out particular things from the content of the email instead of just from the to or from or the subject line. That would be something that would be a value add.

Deployment, no. I don't think it's really deployment, I think it's more of individuals just getting used to if they're not used to something like ServiceNow. Getting used to the way that ServiceNow works. The concept of ServiceNow users and just getting to understand "Can you have notifications for this?" or "Do you want notifications for this?" Those types of things. I think it's hard when users are going through change whenever to modify something and then they take that grace period where they can get used to something new.

Not in the newer versions. I would say that years ago before ServiceNow really went through a big development of backend data infrastructures and fault tolerance. Today, I haven't really seen any of those types of things.

It's actually pretty easy. When you have a new IT person that comes in, you put them in the appropriate groups, you should sit them down, you kind of explain your process flow and how to utilize it. I think one of the easiest things with ServiceNow is the fact that when you log in, you're in groups and if you go to incident, my work, there's all of your work right there. Then the reporting function, it just takes it to the next level because you can go in and say, "Well, this might be my work, but how many things have I closed or opened?" or "What do I have pending?" Just different things that you can do with it to understand.

At my previous firm, we used Remedy. My current firm previously used something called HiQ Tracker or something like that.

There were other products that have been used before, but mostly IT wants to go into making sure we're using the best framework, ITIL framework, ITIL processes, making sure that you're using metrics and tracking and understanding where all of your resources are being utilized across your infrastructure so that you can get the best value out of the people that you have on staff.

For me, it was easy. I would say that for some individuals who are not very exposed to ITIL concepts, it can be very hard because they've never been exposed to the whole language, that whole concept, and framework of your problem, incident, and change. Most people, if they've never used ServiceNow before, continue to call incidents, tickets or calls or cases. For some of them to get used to the language, I think that that's where the implementation can get a little hard for individuals and they can get a little frustrated because not everyone is on the same language.

If you're really wanting to understand the time and the effort and the amount of work that flows through your organization, utilizing ServiceNow can help you really build that infrastructure out by tracking incidents and then taking incidents to problems and making sure you have a changed infrastructure, really understand how much downtime you could have with an environment. You can understand how much time the service desk is spending per call, how long your engineers are taking to really resolve a larger issue or deploy an upgrade. From building those processes and then having metrics and KPIs and dashboards, your executive management can really see how much time and effort and if you need more resources within your environment. I was able to show that I needed more staffing just from using reports out of ServiceNow and I was able to show how much of incident climbed within our environment and the gap between two years before and how large we had grown, just an incident processing. Showing how much downtime within our infrastructure had occurred and were we meeting downtime, requirements from our SLAs and organizational requirements.

I think I've been using it for nine years. I think it has changed considerably over the nine years and has gotten much, much better. You can't give something a 10 because there's always room for improvement.

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.

It's easy to get around the platform and understand once you do one application and module. You learn how to use the platform, you can grow and expand it, but it has that same feel and touch no matter what applications you start developing or rolling out.

It's easier to retrain more people. It'll quickly turnover what you've done. If I build something custom I need to be able to turn that over to somebody else and bring them up to speed quicker so I can move on to the next application, having them be familiar with the platform. It makes that transition quicker.

We've actually used some of the orchestration pieces, so for on boarding we're automatically creating user accounts. We're actually taking a feed from our learning management system to know what course they have taken. They can't order something without having taken the class that goes with it. Say like, VPN access, they have to go through the privacy training. What we've done is we've automated looking up to see whether or not they've completed the privacy training. Also, if they're one of our vendors are they going through they're privacy training, look it up through there.

We've basically reduced a whole manual process of validating the course training, 500 hours easily in a month for one person just to do all that validation. We're trying to streamline as many processes as we can. Obviously on-boarding with our HR System is one of our big ones.

I think some of the things we run into is the patching and how often patches come out to fix stuff. Which is a good thing. It's hard to stay on top of that. You've always got to go on and regression test it, so you know if it is a patch that you really need or is it something that can wait. The fourth cycle of the patching makes it hard for us. We have the small team and we've had to regression testing for so many things. We had to partner up with our stakeholders and say, "Hey, we need some of our time. We've got to test this."

We haven't had any issues. Of all the systems in our environment, ours has been the most stable. We're up all the time, so as long as our network stays up, our customers have access. We haven't had any issues or complaints about our performance or up-time.

The scalability is incredible. We had a small team, very small solution. I was able to basically come up with a custom app for them in under 30 days.

We were using an older system. I was an administrator of that when we brought on the ServiceNow platform. That's when I started becoming an administrator.

It's not simple. One of the things I wish we had done is come to Knowledge before doing the implementation. You learn a lot. There's a lot of growing pains. You make mistakes of, "Oh, let’s just have this field," or, "Let's just do this to the table." You find out later it's like, "Maybe we should have done that." About a year into using it you really start feeling comfortable with it. A lot of the stuff they're doing now out of the box is usable, just right there without any customization. The biggest thing would be, "Yes, come here, go through all the training. Don't start tweaking stuff, learn it and then go implement it."

Play with it. Get a demo instance. Play with it. Come up with your use cases and see if it can fulfill all of those needs. Find out where they gaps are and what training you need to be able to use it. The other one talk to everybody else. Find other customers. The biggest thing we've found is other people that have used it, and just bouncing ideas off of them and asking them questions.

I've used Heat, Remedy, all those systems in the past. The way ServiceNow is going with the platform and staying on top of things, and the fact that it is so scalable for your business needs is an advantage. Whether it's the out of the box ITSM or a custom application. We also do the HR Case Management. That's actually been a breeze, our HR Team is a heck of a lot happier than what they previously had.

As I'm a developer, what I would say is that it's very flexible. The tool can be fully customized. You can do anything to everything, and so I would say that would be the key feature for me as a developer. I can do whatever the client asks for as everything is possible.

Let's say what happens is the customers want rapid delivery to get their operations. So for that they need something to be implemented, at least a vanilla system very easily. So ServiceNow's out-of-the-box features are so good to start with and then down the line, let's say they use it for three months, then it's very easy to just change things.

First of all, nowadays customers are moving all their native applications into ServiceNow. So it's definitely a kick start for them to start using the out-of-the-box features, and then realizing the potential of this tool, and then start getting their native applications loaded to ServiceNow. And eventually down the line after a few years, all their applications will be in ServiceNow. So now you have a single source of truth.

It's mature, but I would say that there are a couple of models, which I think in ITSM, they are not that mature yet. They're still doing it, and definitely even to customize it, but I am talking the out-of-the-box product. When you say ITSM, some of the processes I would say aren't that mature enough because I also have gone through the ITL training.

In particular I would say the SLA, but they have a new release. They have added a couple of features and that should suffice. That was the gap of the earlier version.

There were issues deploying Fuji, but not after that.

It's a very new system, and we see bugginess. In Helsinki we found that we were using one feature but we kept getting errors. I thought it was something that I did, so I spent three or four hours and I couldn't get my answers. So then I realized I basically re-realized when I spoke to ServiceNow people and they troubleshooted that it was a bug. In terms of performance it's very good.

It's very scalable. I've been working with two major clients and they're pleased with scalability.

The biggest part is the ServiceNow community. It's very active, and you can just type anything in Google, it's very easy. You'll get answers that way.

I have experience with HP Service Management. That's how I started my career. So in terms of the processes, both are good. While HP was also mature, ServiceNow processors have flexibility which is and that's amazing, and it's easy as well.

When a customer starts with ServiceNow, they go with it out-of-the-box, that's very easy. Just a couple of configurations here and there without any customizations. That's very easy in terms of implementation, and even customizations, it's pretty easy. It's smooth, and that's why we as product developers like the product, because it's too flexible. It's very flexible.

You need to look at what tool you're currently using, what gaps you have, and what pain areas could easily be fixed by the flexibility of ServiceNow. Based on that I would say, OK, why go with ServiceNow and not continue with the one that you're using.

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.

For me, the most valuable feature is the platform aspect - the ability to create custom apps and even tailor the existing ones to your company's needs. Each organization is a little bit different. We all do ITIL. We all speak ITIL, but ITIL can mean different things in different organizations, and that's really the core power in ServiceNow is you can make it what you need it to be.

I think that the biggest benefit is the ability to consolidate apps. For example, my background is actually in maintenance, so we would have three, four, or five different applications that we had to use for just performing routine maintenance on equipment. ServiceNow allows you to consolidate those apps into a single platform, so you can consolidate your skillsets. You've got a few developers that know the ServiceNow platform. Now those few developers can help you build and maintain all those apps rather than having different skillsets across.

The big area of improvement that I see is in the licensing model for the CreateNow app. There are huge opportunities. Right now, ServiceNow is still largely consolidated primarily to IT. They started expanding to HR. They've started expanding to legal, but developers like myself, I've got lots of ideas for apps. As I said, my background is in maintenance, so I see the opportunity for the platform, and we really need to get the CreateNow licensing simplified to a way that even ignorant little old me can figure out.

I've been using the platform for four years.

Honestly, I've been extremely impressed, especially as time has gone on. I was on the platform before the high availability came around, and so I want to say it was Knowledge 12. I was actually working for a company on the IT operations desk using ServiceNow. I was in the middle of a session and got called out because ServiceNow went down, and even before high availability, we had a backup pretty quickly. I was able to go break back into my session and get back to it, so now, with high availability, I can't recall a moment since where I have actually seen an instance truly down where the instance itself was down.

There have been problems with applications, but even then, we've hot-patched on the fly to fix issues. It's just so agile at getting back to operational.

I think that's part of the problem is that the common answer whenever I'm asked, "Okay. Well, if we do this, how much is it going to cost?" My response to the client is usually, "You're going to have to talk to your ServiceNow sales rep." For a company where so much is based on that, that quick response, jump online, get your service, get the services you need right away, it's a little frustrating sometimes when you're dealing with the licenses, and it's like, "Wouldn't it be great if there was a service catalog for this?"

My advice would be if you're looking, trying to bill, or looking to go with a single niche app and you just want to spend it off and go with it, then by all means, pick whatever app you're looking at. If you're looking for something that you can bring into your organization to be more than just a single purpose, if you are looking to truly transform your organization with the tools that you're using, ServiceNow is the go-to.

The most valuable parts of ServiceNow for us is the flexibility that it has, that it's a platform, and that we can develop pretty much anything that we need, not only for IT, but also for HR, our finance department, our register's office, pretty much any organization around campus. ServiceNow provides us with a platform that we can develop the tools that are necessary for just about any function on campus.

It gives us one platform that we can go in and do reporting. Reporting is probably one of the key features, it's getting access to data that we have in ServiceNow and being able to report on that is a key element in how we are analyzing and making decisions. We can quickly pull up reports, graphs, charts, whatever we need to be able to make decisions, where beforehand just to pull the data was a lot harder.

We've developed a number of apps or workflows that literally have taken days or weeks to complete because of the approval process. We've taken that into a workflow where now the approvals are sent via email. A user, or an administrator just needs to simply click on that email, click on approve, send it back. We've seen in some of those cases where, like I said, it's gone from days or weeks to literally hours and minutes. Another scenario is we've taken our employee leave system from a paper base where paper had to be filled out manually, signed, given to a staff assistant to enter into our ERP system to being done on the IT systems.

We've now taken that entire process where an employee fills it out online wherever they may be. They submit it, it routes to their supervisor for an approval. That approval comes back, and then that system is fed into our ERP system. There's no manual process to it, other than entering the leave request, selecting the days, and the number of hours you're taking, and the supervisor approving it. We estimate that university-wide, that's probably saving about 2,000 hours per year just on employees having to enter that data back into our ERP system.

Probably the biggest thing that is frustrating is the changes in their price structure, their price modeling. That's been very frustrating for us. Since we came on four years ago, it's changed quite a bit over time. There's been a lot of uncertainty on what the pricing scheme is going to be. It's worked out well for us, but that uncertainty as the company has grown, not knowing where they're going with it, has been a little frustrating.

The first real latency issue we had was about a month ago. We attributed it to probably some updates that we had run. We backed those off to see if they impacted any of that performance. We were thinking it was something we had done. Come to find out that they had transferred us from their Virginia data site to their San Jose, I believe and they had some issues. Once we recognized that it wasn't on our end, we notified them and they were quick to respond to it. That's the only real latency issue that we've had. It's always a concern. That's something that we're always very aware of is because our users are like, "If ServiceNow continues to grow, what's going to be the impact to performance?"

As we grow as an organization, meaning the number of developers we have in the system, we've had a big concern with how we give access to developers, but don't allow them to hurt the whole environment once they’re in. There again, the changes that they've introduced with Helsinki, and that being able to do more sculpt applications, and narrow the access that admins have is a huge improvement. We keep growing as far as the number of developers we have in the system, but we have major concern over what they can touch, and what they should and shouldn't touch.

Scaling, as far as what we're doing in the system, we haven't have any issue with. Scaling, as far as the number of developers and how to organize that, as far as bringing more and more people into actually develop on it, that's been our concern. The time commitment to get them up and running, speed, get them trained, especially trained in how we do things. The other part is the access that we give them, so the issue is not with the solution itself, it's more organizationally.

We had a multitude of systems. When we talked about a knowledge base, Knowledge Base was a home-grown system that we had outgrown as far as IT and the university. We ran into severe limitations with our Knowledge Base. We had old content out there. ServiceNow allowed us to restructure how we're doing knowledge, and implementing a knowledge base to the entire campus. Incident, we were using Footprints, which was eventually bought out by BMC.

It was sold two or three time in Footprints. We had used Remedy. Remedy proved to be so cumbersome to manage, as far as an incident management tool. We've gone multiple directions. ServiceNow, as far as incident management, allows us to quickly escalate issues to the proper teams. Not only across IT, but we've incorporated it in so we can escalate issues to departmental IT personnel as well, and even outside of IT where necessary.

I'm a big proponent of ServiceNow. While I think it's a great system, it's not a silver bullet. I don't think there is a silver bullet system out there for IT, or for an enterprise. I would say ServiceNow is as close, in the variety of systems that I've come across, it's as close as a system has come to meeting not only an IT need, but an organizational need. That's initially where we started. We started it at with an IT need. I would say in order for it to be successful, you have to have buy-in from the top. If your administration is buying in with it, and can show their level of support for that change, that system, it makes it go a lot easier. We had a mixture of support. Some things went well. Others, we didn't have the support, and so it was an uphill battle.