ServiceNow Reviews

The flexibility - we've been able to change it and make it look like our brand, so we have our brand logo on it, etc. We've been able to accommodate a lot of our old customization than we had done in our previous system, we've been able to roll that in, that's some of the niceties with the platform. I think that's one of the biggest advantages for us, is the flexibility to be able to do the dashboards and try to get people more involved in the application rather than running a report.

It allows us to offer a different variety of toolsets for our staff, which our last system was not very flexible in that regard. Allowing my customers to go in and do their own dashboards, write their own reports, change the color of their screens has made them feel more involved and more engaged in the tool. We're seeing more requests for newer things and different things. People are thinking outside the box instead of just thinking inside of it.

As far as the hospital industry, we have not really rolled it out or it's not as big a feature to our external customers right now (the clinicians in the hospital). What we're looking to do though is to provide our outside customers the ability to do more things through the service catalog and have one central location for doing things. We have different systems that do different things, so we can bring them and ServiceNow's platform will allow us to bring all of those items into one spot, so it's a one stop shop. That's what we're looking to do, that's what is best for the hospital.

The training, and that's not the tools, I'm very happy with the tools, it's just I have not been able to get my arms wrapped around it, to be able to do all the multiple things that I want to do. We're still learning it. I was telling someone the other day "I feel like I'm a developer," but then again I'm not really a developer, because I just need that one or two more advanced courses to push me off the edge so that I can get in and do all these great things that people are talking about doing. I just haven't seen that piece.

We did have some performance issues where some of the system areas were slow, but that was really our fault. It was a blip in the lifecycle. I mean comparatively we don't have any downtimes, we've got a hundred percent availability, so we're very happy in that regard. I'm also very happy with their support, they're very engaging and they've been very helpful when we have had problems.

There was a home grown solution as well as an external solution. We had had that solution for over twenty years and it had been through many different partners and many different hands, and it was not very customizable. I think that especially with ServiceNow, it's allowed us to start pushing forward the thought of ITIL within our authority.

That was Service Desk Express. We actually had it when it was Magic Solutions back in 1997, out of Newark, New Jersey. It actually was the lighter version of, it was the smaller offering from BMC.

Ours was very complex. We had several issues because we were not in ITIL shop, and because we were not only changing our tool but really changing the culture of the way we had done things in the past, there was a lot of push back. Having them come in and having ServiceNow's help was good since they did a great job. It wasn't easy, it was kind of a struggle. We did have some issues where we kind of hoped that the vendor that we had brought in to help us with the implementation would tell us what industry standards or best practices were. We didn't see it, we were missing some of those pieces. That made it kind of hard. We also had an executive turnover in the middle of it, so that doesn't help.That hindered our implementation. 

My suggestion to people would be to come and learn about the tool and learn about everything it can do before you make any decisions and before you start your implementation, because if I had to do my implementation over again I would change what I was trying to do. Like we implemented three pieces, or one piece, that really wasn't very helpful and I would have rather have tried something different.

I'd do it. I mean just do it. If you're looking for a flexible tool that's going to grow with you, that's going to expand your flexibility, or expand your team, or expand how you do things and streamline things, I would do it. We've only been on it three years, but we've already done one upgrade, and I was prepared for the worst. I had come into work at midnight, and brought my snacks and sat at the desk and then basically watched the upgrade, and I won't be doing that again. I mean it's just that easy, it really is.

We initially got on board because it's a single system of record, and we're trying to centralize a lot of different apps. It's enabled us to decommission a number of different systems that we were using such as incident change, problem management, asset management, financial etc. and it's enabled us to pull them all together so now we can develop an entire portal inside of ServiceNow. We just enabled it last month, to bill out catalog items and we have been able to use the financial element to then cross bill all to our lines of business, so it's been huge success for us so far.

There's are a lot of benefits, and it depends on our audience. In the department I work in, Technology Portfolio Business Management, the biggest benefit was the ability to do asset management in a centralized place and to do the financial elements of that together. I also work with the Infrastructure Team and their key element right now was to centralize incident problem and change and build those functions out of the company. We're now expanding it to another audience which is our global Network Operations Center, and for them the biggest benefit is going to be a centralized dashboard of all their event management. Then we have another infrastructure team that would say the biggest benefit is probably the business process mapping element and the ability when there is an incident to be able to drill down and understand exactly where those problems are in the environment.

It's so new to us, everything is shiny and everything works well so it's hard to state that right now. We are pretty much loving everything, especially at Knowledge 16 where we got all kinds of new ideas to expand our footprint in the company. I'd say we don't have a lot of negatives, quite yet. There's a few little limitations that we run into with each of our implementations but they're very minor. Drill down capabilities and reports maybe or I think one of the bigger ones we ran into with our financial management implementation was that there weren't enough layers in the hierarchy to do all the split costing that we were trying to do but we worked through it. We just managed it a different way. Part of it was how we did it beforehand and trying to bring that in versus what ServiceNow says is the best practice, so we're still adapting.

We've been using Geneva in-house for about six months.

It's been beautiful. We spun the thing up as soon as we signed the contract. Right away they asked us what they names were. We had development tests and production instances. I can't speak to how fast it was bit to was pretty quick. We've not had any system interruptions whatsoever. It's been available 24/7.

We had some homegrown tools, and for incident management itself we had a multi tenant instance with a vendor called Compucon. We shared an instance which wasn't going well, so we brought it in house and then decommissioned our internal apps.

It was incredibly easy. We had the vanilla version and then we used a professional services vendor to kind of help us weed through what was there, to help us understand it, do some initial workflow set up, so it was very simple.

Our current challenge, because it's a little bit of a rub right now is we're going through re-negotiations on contract because absolutely you're going through the big sales pitch, it can do everything at a cost. We were given all of it, and we purchased a small amount and now we're saying, "Oh yeah, we want to do that." Well, more fees for that, more fees for that. So it's been a real challenge to understand what that pricing structure looks like.

That's one thing how they bill off of nodes and CI's and stuff for some of the capabilities and then we've had a challenge with. Getting to a steady state with our IT users, understanding what capabilities they can truly have with the matrix that was provided to us, and then given a sufficient amount of time after go-live to really reconcile and get to a steady state before we go through and re-calibrate the contract to include whatever. So that's an active conversation that's happening right now but we're working with some great people so we're confident we'll get through it.

So far the people we've been working with are great. The system is available all the time, and we have high hopes for the single system of record concept where everything is linked together. We love the user experience concept that we're starting to roll out. That's a huge piece for us as our big disconnect from our business slash end users in IT, the way they communicate, throw things over the fence. We see this as a great opportunity to kind of bridge that gap and kind of bring both players together.

One of the reasons we're moving over financial management in addition to system of record is we use VMWare and we're shutting down for very specifically to that container or that tool. I think we're paying VMware three, four, or five times what we're paying with ServiceNow so, we have a huge desire to get off that in short order plus we're already seeing more features in ServiceNow for value add then what we had in VMWare.

Because I do IT planning and program management, the project portfolio management part is most helpful and useful, but I can also see the integration to other parts of the IT operation as well. I think that's most useful because we are looking from an end-to-end perspective within the IT organization, though we may have different functional teams, but we are working as one team, so it's important that the various operations or processes are tied and integrated into one platform, in one end-to-end process.

I can see a very good product strategy. We see enhancements or enhanced features in each of the releases. I see the roadmap is good and the technology underneath is also good.

During the Knowledge16 conference, I found out more about the IT financial management part, which is important to me because we're trying to do more finance on our IT operations so that we can measure performance. We can also share info with our business shareholders and stakeholders as well. I see those features as really useful when we transform our IT organization into a service organization.

In our region we don't have many choices of implementation partners. At the same time, I don't see that they are as proficient as they are in other regions.

Today we aren't seeing major issues but one of our concern is that it's expensive.

Not at this company, but beforehand I had used Remedy. It is a very traditional IT Service Management tool, basically a help desk, but I think there's a lot more in ServiceNow.

The underlying technology and also the application or customization facility, or the technology behind ServiceNow actually is quite robust and quite agile, which we can make use of to do a release and deliver it quickly.

We're using Deloitte as our implementation partner. They are doing a fantastic job, but they're just one particular resource, one or two that can help us, but in our region, we don't have many choices on partners that are proficient in ServiceNow as well as in IT operations.

We are trying to do it in a phased approach, we want to have the initial system for us, and then we'll use it and improve-enhance it later on. I don't see that we'll have major issues, because our goal is not to have it all in one step, but rather we are evolving our solution.

I do not have particular details, but what I heard from my boss is that it's not a cheap solution, especially when you want to roll out to more people or more colleagues in an organization. That is really a significant factor we're considering because in terms of the cost it's not cheap, so we hesitate. We can see a lot of scalability and expansion possibility in rolling out beyond the IT organization.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We primarily use it for change management and incidents. We get the greatest value from our change management. We recently moved to ServiceNow from HP Service Manager about two years ago and it's been leaps and bounds just better than what we had before. We're able to do our approvals, automated approvals through email, through other means, and it's just made everything so much more smooth.

We found because we're working on an internal cloud solution right now, we found that being able to integrate with other solutions it's been so great because we're able to use the APIs and web service calls to integrate with SCCM, Microsoft's orchestration tool and we're just been able to find that it's so versatile in working with other products and it's made everything so much easy.

The only complaint that I would have is just the interface itself is not always user friendly. We get some complaints from users that they don't know exactly what all the features, all the fields mean, and what they're used for. I guess I want it to be  a little more user friendly.

I wasn't really involved in the installation of it. I'm more on the admin side so I can't really speak to that.

We do our maintenance updates about once a month but we haven't really had any downtime at all since we've put it in place. We recently went through an upgrade about a month ago, a couple of months ago, and there was no issue, there were no issues at all.

We haven't really had to do that yet because it's fairly new in our environment we haven't really had to scale it yet. We're basically using the same infrastructure that we put in initially.

Upgrades are fairly easy. Like I said, we don't have any real issue when it comes to updates and maintenance and things like that. I would say we haven't really had any major downtime incidents since we've had it in place.

I think getting your support team involved early on so that they understand how the process is going to change from whatever they're currently using is a big key. We had some growing pains initially going from one system to the other, but getting the support team involved early on in the process would be very beneficial to anyone that's moving forward with ServiceNow.

ServiceNow enables us to transform IT as it's a business driver. In my mind, we can shift the way IT works to make it more business aligned, business focused, and business oriented. Having a tool that kind of helps IT think differently about how we deliver services is important to me.

We're rolling out service level management this year and part of that is because we had this foundation of our CMDB. Our business services are in there. Being able to report on things based on how our business service is impacted, it's going to be the first time technology's been able to do that at this company. That's exciting.

Speed of delivery is really at the forefront. Being able to do things faster removes those IT obstacles out of the way for our business users and lets them do what they need to do quicker. We're enabling our business to be more nimble without bogging them down with technology.

I feel like there should be perhaps more unit testing before patches are rolled out because every patch has broken our entire catalog. That's kind of the most time consuming areas to test because of volume. There's so many catalog items. Each one has to get looked at, the workflows, each step has to be done. Every patch has broken our entire catalog, and I'd love for that to go away.

From a user perspective, we noticed a slowdown when we moved from Eureka to Geneva, so I've got a lot business customers that are saying, "Man, your tool got slower." I don't have any stats behind it. It's running all the time.

We add users constantly. We onboard people and they are automatically added. We have a portal that's internal for our users that don't need to do changer class but they do need to request things in the catalog so those people are able to log in and request stuff.

I think the only thing where there was anything negative was now you have two tools in the interim so people still used Remedy for some of the ITIL processes and now they have ServiceNow for change. Then as we increased our capabilities in ServiceNow, more and more people were happier.

Just really for me, it's all about the business case. What's a success story to tell? What are you able to do now that you couldn't do before? Some of the things that I would showcase are the wild set that we used to be in as far as requests goes and now we have the catalog and we're growing that everyday. Also, having a business portal is a huge selling point. Anything where you can spin up a portal as easily as you can with ServiceNow and make IT approachable for a business user is important. Every time they patch, they break the entire catalog. They need to fix that.

For me, it's basically the ITSM rules of ServiceNow. You can help the companies and all that stuff with their assets as well and all their service catalogues. It's a pretty complete platform that you can basically create whatever you want.

For us, we can have all the information organized, all PIR processes. We can have, as I said before, all of our equipment, assets, and employee control all in one small place.

Some of the things which I've seen that they're improving now, it was the UI. It was a pretty basic UI which needed improvement. Now with Angular and stuff like that, making it more responsive, that is very helpful, but they need to work on the UI more.

They don't seem to have that major impact. It's not a huge difference. Maybe from Fuji to Geneva it might have changed a bit, but we didn't see it to Helsinki.

The performance also depends on if you have too many changes, depends on the script and the developer that has worked on that instance. In the out of the box service, no, I haven't had any performance issues.

For the most part it's easy. It depends on what the user wants, but most of it is all easy. They have the business rules, client script, everything is basically ready for you to develop.

The cloud is the future, so you want to have everything in the cloud, everything organized, everything in one place. Basically, that's it. The cloud is the future.

I find the product to be valuable because even before they started really pushing it as a platform as a service, that is the biggest reason as to why I leaned towards its purchase two years ago; it's platform as a service. We didn't really purchase it as a SAS product. It's valuable to us because we do a lot of custom development on the platform.

We could have chosen many different platforms but for lack of a better word, it was the easiest to be able to move to, taking all of our existing processes and data from different sources. It was born in the cloud so we didn't have to worry about all of the nuances of being able to ensure that it would work as a cloud application. That was a big piece and it already had a service, although rudimentary, a service portal available with it. I think in the previous versions it's referred to as an ESS portal. With Fuji on forward I think they refer to it as a service portal.

If you look at the number of support calls that we put into ServiceNow, it's absolutely minimal because we filter. We don't have our users calling into ServiceNow directly and we trained our users, etc. I don't really see the value, monetarily, from what we're spending from a support perspective. Because if we call into ServiceNow it's because we're experiencing something at a much higher level, not something that is an easy fix. It's usually we've recognized performance issues or something like that. Their up time has been satisfactory for the most part.

For the most part, the product is very stable. We host customers ourselves and we know how difficult it is. As a host provider you're not completely 100% in control of everything, you're dependent on other vendors to be up.

We've had three major upgrades since we implemented and there have been no issues. A lot of that has to do with the fact that we followed a very regimented custom development best practice so that we wouldn't interfere with any of their upgrade processes.

It does not necessarily scale from a licensed user perspective, we don't grow as much because our license users are really just our core set of resources within our company that's internal. From an external customer perspective, our customers are international/worldwide, so we have folks from Africa, Singapore, London accessing the system. We went from an initial 8,000 users to double that amount from an external customer.

We also continue to use our own application that we develop which supplements ServiceNow.

We had a lot pushing us to go very fast so we implemented ServiceNow in less than a 90-day period once we actually started progressing to actual implementation. Some portions of just deciding upon the product and all of that took much longer, but once we procured the product and actually set on our way to implement, in less than 90 days we were live.

Advice to peers: It would depend on the problems they're trying to solve. It really would depend on the problems they're trying to solve. As an ITSM solution, I would highly recommend it, first choice. For something else, it would depend.