ServiceNow Reviews

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.

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.