ServiceNow Reviews

We primarily use the solution just for our ticketing purposes to keep track of our incidents, projects, and tasks.

We use it for internal projects, circuit routers, upgrades, keeping track of vendor contracts, et cetera. Basically, it's just a repository of everything that we do and to support our internal clients that deal with maintaining bookkeeping as well as providing the tickets, keeping track of projects, and stuff like that.

It's great for keeping everyone informed in the company - not just IT. Everyone becomes aware of change requests and incidents so the entire company is on the same page.

It's great that everybody is in the loop - especially from an incident perspective for a user. If I'm waiting for somebody to get back to me, or if I'm researching something, I could update the notes and I don't have to call the user. The user will get that ticket via email. They're aware. You don't have to go and chase people and update them individually, or even on a group basis. Whatever I enter into my notes is sent out to everyone. There's no gap in information sharing.

The general incident management is very good. On a day-to-day basis, we get incidents and we need to keep records. The incident tickets are being used a lot.

The change management within ServiceNow is great. It's great due to the fact that it keeps track, of everything. Any change requests that touch a particular business or function can be used and distributed amongst whoever's involved in that project. Everyone is informed of what changes are needed or done. I don't need to go and individually create a separate distribution list. It's simple.

The solution offers very good functionality and transparency.

From my perspective, when I create any incidents or even a change request or any projects that I'm dealing with, I could upload as many documents as I want, unless people take the software and they basically structure it to the way they want it. 

It's easy to use. If somebody is in an IT business or even has a basic knowledge of any ticketing system, they could learn it very quickly.

The solution is very stable.

The product scales well.

There aren't any improvements that I could suggest off top of my head, as it's a well-informed well-structured solution. From a business perspective or an individual, IT perspective, there isn't much to change at all. 

Some companies may find that adding as many documents as they like to an incident makes the solution problematic. 

Once a change request has been created once it's been approved and been submitted, there is no way to go in on that particular change request and submit an additional task. You would have to revert the change, then submit an additional task for a group to act on. I'd like it if we had the ability to, once the task had been approved and created, go in and create an additional task for a particular group to action. That's definitely one thing I would want to make a change to.

I've used the solution for a very long time. With my current company, I've used it for five years. However, I also used it at my previous company for around 20 years. It's been a few decades at this point.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any problems. It hasn't gone down and it hasn't crashed. There are no bugs or anything like that. I don't see it any now and I haven't in the past - even after 20 or more years. This is flawless software. 

It's scalable. You could easily modify it and you could create reports or you could do whatever you want to do with it based on the privileges. There's no downside to it. You could create your individual report or you could use a template and create your own individual report and you can use search criteria for your own searches for incidents, change, tasks, anything. It's very flexible.

We have about 100 users on the solution right now.

We may increase usage in the future. Right now, it's being used quite extensively.

I can't speak to how technical support is in terms of helpfulness. We'll go to our backend developers and they basically deal or interact with them. I haven't had any interaction with the ServiceNow technicians or anybody else from ServiceNow.

I've been in the industry for almost 20 or 25 years. With the previous ticketing system that I used to use, which was Remedy, there's a big difference. ServiceNow is just so much easier.

I didn't handle the initial setup.

That's a different group that does altogether. It's a packaging portion. We basically tell them if there are certain things or floor processes that we need to create. We'll create it on a front end, we'll create the diagram, the workflow, and everything else. We give it to the backend office and they'll basically make the changes as they go. They'll give us a test case scenario before it goes live, and any modification or any changes that are required. We reply back to them with the information and they basically make the changes according to what we want. From a packaging or modification perspective, it's not something that my team or I do. 

I'm not sure how many users are currently maintaining the product.

We're just a customer and an end-user.

We are using the most recent version of the solution at this time.

The product is well-versed, and it's simple to use - which is why I would recommend it. You've just got to know how you're going to organize or structure everything. Whoever's basically managing or deploying the software needs to map it out. They should be able to modify or scale it to the way they want it, however. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been very happy with its capabilities. The flexibility and the ability to modify what you want are great - and, on top of that, it's pretty simple. If you know how to do a simple query, you should be able to pull up anything that you want. That's what I like about this software

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.

ServiceNow is a powerful tool, but to utilize its features most efficiently, it requires proper fine-tuning and design. When developed according to specific requirements, it becomes an excellent solution for ticketing and reporting management, offering enhanced capabilities for streamlined operations.

ServiceNow optimizes our IT service management processes through its knowledge base feature. This repository contains solutions and insights into challenges encountered during request or incident resolution. A select group reviews and collects this knowledge to analyze how it can streamline processes or enhance user interfaces, such as creating simplified catalogs for quicker request submission. Integration with ServiceNow ensures that every request or incident benefits from this knowledge, enabling faster delivery through automation. Focusing primarily on requests and incidents, which are the most common user interactions, leveraging the knowledge base in this manner significantly contributes to refining and fine-tuning operations management.

ServiceNow significantly enhances our workflow efficiency, as demonstrated by a straightforward example of adding a user to a group. Through analysis of over a thousand requests, primarily for server or file share access, we identified the top ten groups frequently requested. Utilizing this insight, we implemented backend automation scripts integrated into ServiceNow's action tasks. Now, when users request access to a file share or server, they select from a dropdown menu of the top ten file shares, streamlining the process. The automation prompts users for necessary information, such as their ID and approvals email, before swiftly granting access within one to two minutes. Previously, such requests could take up to twenty minutes or even a day due to lack of clarity. However, with this automated workflow, users have predefined options, reducing confusion and minimizing errors. Additionally, the system captures requests not covered by the predefined options, allowing us to monitor and address emerging needs effectively. This improvement has significantly reduced the occurrence of errors and escalations, leading to smoother service delivery.

ServiceNow portal has significantly enhanced our user experience and service delivery, particularly through its advanced reporting system. This system allows us to gather feedback and insights, such as the number of pending items assigned to individuals, reasons for delays, and the status of updates. The reporting capabilities within ServiceNow enable us to conduct in-depth analysis of ticket resolutions quickly and efficiently, facilitating improved decision-making and operational efficiency.

ServiceNow's reporting and analytics functionalities significantly contributed to decision-making processes, earning a rating of eight out of ten.

Although I lack extensive experience with it, I find that ServiceNow is generally straightforward to integrate.

The most impactful feature in our day-to-day operations is the ticket status, which provides crucial visibility into the progress of each resource or incident. Whether it's marked as pending for a vendor or awaiting user information, this status allows us to understand precisely how long a particular request has been waiting and for what purpose.

Improving the quality of consulting services is essential and can lead to significant enhancements. The user interface for accessing assistance sometimes disconnects.

In terms of stability, there may be occasional hiccups, but they are not overly frequent.

Scaling up is effortless, as evidenced by the platform's adoption by approximately thirty thousand users.

The technical support provided is satisfactory, but there is room for improvement, particularly in the consulting aspect. I would rate it eight out of ten.

Positive

While I'm not deeply involved in the deployment process, with careful planning and architecture, the complexity can be minimized.
Maintaining the system isn't straightforward. It requires essential knowledge and a support team well-versed in the product. The size of the support system, with a minimum of ten staff members, is recommended to adequately support the service.

The pricing is reasonable and affordable, making it suitable for businesses ranging from small to large scale.

ServiceNow is a versatile solution suitable for businesses of all scales, from small to large enterprises. My advice to others considering its use would be to thoroughly understand the product's capabilities before implementation. Aligning these capabilities with your specific requirements ensures optimal utilization of the features available, facilitating efficient management and future scalability. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

We use the product for ITSM, DevOps, change management, problem management, and incident management. We utilize all the modules.

The product's integration functionality in the change management module has significantly improved efficiency in our organization. It has enhanced the delivery process with automated operations.

The most valuable aspects of ServiceNow are incident and problem management in the workspace. It helps us create meetings within the platform where users can collaborate to resolve issues.

They could improve license management, particularly when integrating different applications or toolsets. The process of how licenses are billed and the potential for noncompliance issues could be clearly stated during module purchase. It results in unforeseen costs when integrating various tools, such as DevOps, where contributors from projects may be misinterpreted as core contributors, leading to unnecessary charges. They could make the licensing process clear to understand.

We have been using ServiceNow since 2020. We use the latest version.

It is a stable platform.

We have 30000 ServiceNow users in our organization. It needs to be more scalable, particularly in the context of Microsoft's roadmap. The existing cloud integrations and point-to-point integrations with Azure DevOps might have challenges during a transition to GitHub. We have to manually re-configure the same.

The technical support services are dependent on integration partners. 

Negative

We used Jira before.

It is a cloud solution. The initial setup is difficult. It requires someone with knowledge of the ServiceNow platform. One can take assistance from a DevOps engineer for configuration.

It takes a few weeks to complete. We have deployed it in different regions. We need to synchronize the changes across all the regions as well.

We take assistance from our integration partner for implementation.

We have experienced improvements in time-saving since implementing ServiceNow. The change module has allowed for identifying and onboarding services with low business criticality, streamlining the approval process for changes and deployments. It makes the deployment process simple, fast, and easy.

It is an expensive platform.

We have bought the product's standard version with different components implemented across all the departments of our organization. We can add more components as per requirement.

We need assistance from specialists with in-depth knowledge of the platform, such as those holding ServiceNow certifications for complex business requirements.

I rate it six out of ten.

We use it as a tool to develop and monitor attestations and assessments where we develop questions based on our policies and ask application owners to explain and show compliance with our policies through a series of attestation questions.

I refer to it often when I'm looking up applications in the CMDB. The CMDB gives me a lot of information on the application in terms of what certain parameters are, who owns the application, and what's the structure of the organization owning the application. It gives me a fair amount of information.

We are using the latest version. We stay up to date with all the patches.

It helps with how well our applications are compliant with our policies, and that helps with the overall security of our applications. We are very detailed with our policies, and there is a buy-in for security across the company. So, we're able to show which applications are in compliance with the policies and which aren't, and we're able to target those that aren't for a little extra work and attention.

The thing that I like most about it is the easy integration with the CMDB. I'm able to look at the CMDB for applications and develop my assessments and attestations based on the application and point them at that application owner. So, I can really automate the whole thing.

Its setup is tough. It takes a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience.

In terms of features, we're pretty happy with the product as it is. They make regular improvements. We look at them, evaluate them, but we haven't seen anything that we wanted to use it for, though we continuously reevaluate our tools to see where we can expand our capabilities.

I have been using this solution for three years.

We find the product to be very stable. Because it is a cloud-based application, you have your issues with networks and all, but I don't consider that a part of the problem with the application. I find the application to be extremely stable.

It is fairly easy to scale. When you start adding a lot of different modules to it, it becomes a bit more complex, but if you have well-trained staff who can manage it in production, it becomes relatively simple, especially once you develop processes to handle that.

In terms of usage, just about everybody in the company uses it. If you're in technology or you're using technology, you use the interface with this application one way or the other. This is the company's ITIL tool. This is how we handle requests and manage the integrity of our systems and applications. I think it's going to be here for a while. How long? I can't tell.

Tech support is very knowledgeable. We've used them, and they've been very helpful. If someone is starting with ServiceNow, I would recommend them to spend a fair amount of time with their tech support. However, they do tend to point you towards some of their vendors who provide consulting services, and as with most consulting services, it can be all over the place.

We were using another solution. It was the standard for service management for so many years, but it was horrible. I don't remember the name.

The setup is tough. It takes a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience. So, you have to basically work with the product on an almost exclusive basis to become very knowledgeable. However, it is very powerful, especially once you have people who can write JavaScript and who can improve and make the product do a lot more than it does coming out of the box.

We have operations staff that handles the ongoing maintenance. It's not anything where we're having to pull down servers or anything. It's just managing access and maintaining the integrity of the CMDB. Everything else is just types of ITIL efforts such as handling tickets, processing requests. That's it. I find it very useful.

I cannot speak for the company in terms of what the company sees. All I can say is that from what I've used it for, it has been extremely valuable because I don't have to go around with spreadsheets to people. So to me, it is a return on efficiency.

For the modules we use, we found it competitive. I can't think of any costs in addition to the licensing fees.

My advice would be to look at it very carefully. It is a great product, but make sure that it fits your company culture and the way you want to do things because it is a big product.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

We use the solution for workflow automation and business processing.

It has been effectively used in our organization. We have large chats with 150,000 people and everyone has found it to be useful. Our internal IT team is supporting the tool and trying to get everyone on-board.

We have found the service easy to use, although, we have ended up customising a lot of parameters. It is a functional comprehensive featured solution compared to everything else on the market.

The customization that we are doing for the needs of our organization are difficult to do and could be improved. In the a future release, if they have not done so already, they should include cognitive capabilities features which we are currently lacking. 

I have been using the solution for three years.

We have had no major issues with stability.

We have been in contact with customer service and we have no complaints.

The price of the solution is comparable to industry standards. For the features that we received, it is reasonable.

I have been reviewing a solution called BMC helix potentially coming on board soon. The cognitive capabilities that are being released in the market are pretty good. 

I would recommend this solution. However, we did not have an easy time customizing the tool to do what we wanted it to. I would suggest if it meets 80% of your needs I would adopt the tool, but if not, I think building a custom tool itself would be the way to go at that point.

I did not give the solution a nine because that is too good. I do not think they are at that level. They are the industry leaders, for the automation of workflows. But there is definitely more that could be done. 

I did not rate the solution a ten because nothing is perfect.

I rate ServiceNow an eight out of ten.

We use it as a service desk solution, for ticketing.

First of all, we had several tasks that were performed manually by the service desk and infrastructure teams, but now we have been able to automate those processes and reduce the manual intervention. For example, when an employee from one of those teams goes on vacation, we can block the account and, when he comes back, we can unblock access and reset the password, and everything is done automatically.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility of development for customization.

For example, we are starting now to expand the tool for HR and some other departments. They need applications or processes to improve their tasks. For instance, right now we are discussing, with the Internal Risk team, creation of an application inside ServiceNow so they can open a ticket and follow all the steps according to their process. One of the nice things about ServiceNow is that, if you have your process, you can design the ticket and the form according to your process. That is very useful and can be done quickly.

There's one that I would like to see improved to reduce the cost of our ServiceNow, related to the resetting and unblocking of passwords for users who forget their passwords. We had a conversation about this with ServiceNow. We don't have a huge amount of password reset requests, but the minimum package of resets that ServiceNow offers is much more than we need. In conversations with other companies that have a similar profile to ours, they complained about the same thing: "Why should I have to buy a minimum number of password resets, when that amount is much more than I need?" They should have some kind of scaling of the reset package, like zero to 100, 101 to 300, etc. That would be a little bit more useful for us. That package is very expensive. It's more expensive than if I were to have someone in-house who was dedicated to doing those tasks.

It's a very stable product, it has a very good SLA and RTO. So far, so good, and I expect it will continue like that.

I haven't had any issues with scalability so far, but we're a medium-small company with about 300 users. The most active users are the service desk, infra, and development teams. Overall, we have 50 or 60 heavy users.

Here in Brazil, we have local support from a company called Fast Lane. They are the enterprise that did the development and implementation of the solution in our company. We don't have any issues with them. They are very fast and very helpful. They help us with the design of our processes and the tools.

We had a simple tool with which you would just open a ticket, without SLA, no features. But we had internal issues and realized we should improve our processes. That's why we went to ServiceNow.

The initial setup wasn't so easy, but it wasn't a ServiceNow issue, it was an internal issue. Because it was new for the organization, setting up a cloud solution, we needed to open some ports in the firewall.

One detail we didn't explore so much during the negotiations with ServiceNow was related to Edge Encryption. That is a feature that encrypts all the information that is saved in ServiceNow. It was requested by information security here in our company. We bought it, but the setup for that tool was new here, in Brazil, from what I understood from the vendor. It's a little complicated to have all of the information and all the details set up for it. It took a little bit longer than we expected, but it was a management situation. There was no impact to the business.

We know that ServiceNow is not cheap, it's more expensive than other solutions. But we are trying to increase our ability to handle tickets so that the cost per ticket is less. ServiceNow is a little bit expensive for us, here in Brazil, due to taxes, etc.

We talked with HPE and IBM, but both are on-prem solutions, whereas ServiceNow is a cloud solution. That fact was very important for us, that it is not an on-prem solution, as it reduces our internal cost of support. 

Also, the development time for each process is much shorter than with an on-prem solution. For example, with on-prem, I would have internal processes like change management, open a ticket, fill out all the information, and get the request approved. After that, it would need to be implemented. That would take a long time.

It is very good having this tool. Getting it going went much faster than I expected. We did the setup and had it in production in six months.

The biggest problem for me was our internal process and not Service Now. For example, convincing people to go to a cloud solution, and getting engagement with the solution from information security, were challenges. If you don't have engagement from information security, the project is going to take longer than you expect. The big change for the company, with this solution, is that you're not going to host your data internally, on-prem. You are going to put all your data in a cloud solution. When we spoke about the solution here, within our company, some people said, "Wow! Are you crazy? You are going to put customer information in a cloud that you don't know?" So there are a lot of questions. ServiceNow has all the answers, but if you don't have engagement from information security, it will take you longer.

We have a lot of things we can improve internally, regarding information security, but because we are just starting out, we need our process to mature. I believe ServiceNow can help that a lot. All the features can support us in the future if we expand the tool. We have new models to improve on the automation of our processes in our data center.

My only concern is that when we started to talk with ServiceNow, we received very good attention from them but, after we signed the contract, I didn't know who, in ServiceNow, was taking care of my account. The person sent me an email but he had never been here to ask, "What do you need? How is it going? How is your project?" We didn't get any attention from ServiceNow. We had very good negotiations in the beginning, they were very attentive. But after we signed the contract, they changed my account manager and, today, I really don't know who that guy is.

I would very much like to have him here to discuss the roadmap of the solution or to see what else I can buy. I would like to negotiate some issues that we have, like password resets. I would talk with ServiceNow but, if they are not going to be close to me, I'm not going to spend time running after them to talk with them. I talk with the suppliers and they are helping me, instead of ServiceNow.

I rate ServiceNow at eight out of ten. Why eight and not ten? The relationship with ServiceNow is important for me. I would like to have more engagement from them, to have them here, at my company, so we can talk more strategically. But compared to the other vendors, it gets an eight because it's a cloud solution and I don't have any issues with technical parts or its performance. The tool is very reliable.

ServiceNow's out-of-box process configurations and service-based CMDB data model have revolutionized IT Service Management transformations. Leveraging out-of-box configurations and using frequent small-scope improvement releases (DevOps) has proven to be an effective approach for ensuring timely, lasting improvements to the core service management process.

The traditional ITIL "gather all process requirements 1st" approach to tool design never worked well. In fact, organizations attempting this "Define all Process Requirements" approach would frequently customize the tool to be similar to the process/tool that they were replacing rather than adopting the proven ITSM best practices embedded in ServiceNow. This approach extends the time to value by limiting the focus on ensuring the critical process integration points that drive rapid quantifiable process improvements.

With the right expert guidance facilitating the effectiveness of a strong executive sponsor to ensure the successful adoption of a true service-based culture, a SeviceNow implementation can drive quantifiable process improvements in three to six months in core processes, such as Incident, Problem, Change, Release, Knowledge, Asset and CFG management.

With these core processes integrated and effectively automated, an IT organization is able to transform infrastructure monitoring activities into a true service-based and proactive Event Management capability. This in-turn drives rapid and sustained improvements to service Availability, Capacity, and Demand management processes. Quantifiable service levels may then be negotiated and aligned to meet actual business process requirements.

Bottom line: ServiceNow has shattered the "Five years to a successful Service Management transformation" limitation. With the prerequisite guidance and sponsorship, measurable, and sustainable service level improvements, cost efficiencies can be achieved in 12 months or less!

Note:

1. The importance of acquiring qualified an ITSM expert and their guidance can not be overemphasized. This is preferably to someone outside the current organizational culture.
2. The need for a skilled and charismatic executive sponsor is a proven success-critical requirement for rapid sustained improvements. The right leader will recognize the need for a compelling vision and formal sponsorship strategy for the entire IT leadership team, which they will be accountable for, will ensure the culture change from the traditional siloed infrastructure, and component management focused and heroic effort based culture to a true customer focused and service based culture.

A three phase IT Service Management transformation project resulted in achieving a first year target of less than 4% sustained monthly improvements in true customer experienced availability (based on Incident MTTR metrics) for three key IT Services (three business process automation solutions with formal SLAs). Results obtained were within six months of the project start date.

• Phase 1: Formal process 'maturity' assessments and detailed recommendations. Service Mgmt. Org. restructure with dedicated Process Owners and Service Mgrs. aligned with newly defined IT services (business process related Services). Vision and Sponsorship workshops for IT leadership team resulting in formal Sponsorship Strategy and communications plan.
• Phase 2: Rapid Process Design/Improvement workshops with process owners for Incident, Problem, Change, Release, CFG (ServiceNow PM), and Knowledge Mgmt. designing "to-be" process documents, and integrated, coordinated three month implementation plans. Tool design and implementation plan documented.
• Phase 3: After three month implementation of Phase 2 processes, Rapid Process Design workshops started for Availability, Service Level, Capacity, Demand, and Event management processes. Process documents with detailed process integrations and tool/CMDB requirements spanning all 11 processes. Formal implementation plan deliverables. Coordinated implementation projects initiated.

Primary areas of inefficiencies and delays were related to change resistance and lack of support from the IT Team Lead and IT Manager level staff for involvement in ServiceNow design and training workshops, and lack of support for governing new process policies.

Bottom line issue: Not agreeing in strategy workshops for the recommendation to base performance measures for all IT staff and bonus potential for IT leadership staff on the key process maturity improvement metric targets.

This basic three phase, rapid process design workshop methodology, using an out-of-the-box solution, then the weekly ServiceNow release schedule approach to evolve process designs, has proven successful in meeting target maturity improvement metrics in all cases

Deployment issues were very rare in all projects that had a dedicated ServiceNow Development lead (with a team of Dev and DB skilled staff assigned to the project) involved as a team member with the combined process owners in Rapid Process Design workshops. These workshops involve more than five process owners designing each other's new processes, based on ServiceNow out-of-the-box requirements, guided by the Dev lead and the ITSM expert facilitator (a seasoned facilitator with ITIL Expert certification and ServiceNow bootcamp credentials is recommended).

This approach ensures all process owners and the tool design expert understand the complex integration points between all processes; a key to CMDB relationship requirements insight.

As the tool is SaaS and customization is minimized in the critical early design phase by the Process Workshop's "out-of-the-box" approach, stability and scalability are optimized.

It is excellent, always. This tool and the ServiceNow organization is a class act.

It is excellent, in all cases.

Have experience with BMac software, HPE, IBM and other leading ITSM tools.

ServiceNow has nailed the basic ITIL process integration requirements and the CMDB model is service-based out-of-the-box.

This approach using out-of-the-box and frequent small revisions only works with ServiceNow's quality underpinning best practice framework.

Expert vendor facilitator.