ServiceNow Reviews

I use the solution primarily for IT Financial Management and IT Business Management.

In financial management, this platform has the infrastructure allowing us to expand the way we want to. For example, it gives you many business rules and budget models that you can use to optimize your workflow. It does not put you in a box. Additionally, integrating this solution with other platforms is extremely easy to do.

The asset management application could be improved. They have a lot of the infrastructure built, but it does not come with already made compatibility with some of the most popular vendors, such as Cisco and Microsoft. You have to fix it yourself.

If this solution wants to be a big player in the asset management field, they have to have tools to compete with competitors, such as Tanium, that have integration with Cisco and other vendors.

I have been using this solution for approximately 20 years.

I have not had any issue with the stability.

The scalability is excellent. We have approximately 600 people using this solution in our organization.

The technical support was excellent.

Previously I have used CapStone and Remedy.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The price of this solution is expensive.

I have evaluated Tanium.

For those wanting to implement this solution, I would advise using an expert.

When using this solution you have to expect you will need to continuously optimize it to get the most out of it.

I rate ServiceNow an eight out of ten.

I have two primary uses of ServiceNow:

1. As our ITSM Platform for providing Application Managed Services (AMS) to Enterprise clients who have solutions on Oracle, Workday, Coupa, and ServiceNow.  NOTE: Other groups within my firm also use ServiceNow to provide IT Service Management to clients on Microsoft, SalesForce, and other major vendors.  We have multiple production instances for delivering Service Desk support to various client install bases, including this one for my above mentioned AMS business.

2. As the ITSM platform for our internal, global support framework. This is a separate instance of the one I use for my UK clients and is 'owned' by our US member firm. Said US firm uses this instance to support not only our internal global Management Consulting business but also to provide AMS to US-based external clients.

ServiceNow has enabled us to rapidly deploy Application Managed Services for new clients, with the ability to configure, extend, and tailor our ITSM Platform to meet individual client needs. ServiceNow's multi-instance model helps enable that flexibility. For example, we recently took on a new Workday client by modifying our ServiceNow instance (configurations and workflows) within 5 months, with successful go-live afterward.

ServiceNow has also enabled our Management Consulting business to provide Digital Transformation services for our clients the world over, as we use the platform as an accelerator for doing IT Target Operating Model transformations.

ServiceNow's Customer Service Management (CSM) Pro & DevOps modules in particular - including ServiceNow's strong interface APIs (to Jira in particular in my case) - have allowed us to:

1. Automate some of the more menial tasks while accounting for our need to develop 

2. Deploy a lot of new features and functionality that get continuously and rapidly introduced by the major vendors via their regular upgrades (e.g. Oracle 4 times per year, Coupa 3 times per year, Workday 2 times per year, etc.).

There are no outstanding gaps or deficiencies that I face at the moment for my business or operational needs. That said, I am interested to see the firm's strategic plans for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), and how the particular areas it will expand on from its existing investments (that feature, for example, in its ITSM Pro and CSM Pro modules). Our AMS business will benefit from further automation of the more mundane tasks as we continue to develop the platform's configurations - including the streamlining / automation of our change control workflow for faster deployment (critical when tackling the very frequent upgrade cadences of Oracle, Workday, Coupa, etc.).

4 years

Very stable so far. I have yet to experience an outage of any of the ServiceNow instances my operations/teams use.

Scalability is good on the production side. It could be better performance on some of our lower environments, notably UAT for our global support estate - although I suspect that is partly down to how our Dev team manage their workloads and the access set up they have (too many users floating in/out?). I have not called for an audit however, so my view here is not qualified.

Minimal need for support - from my personal vantage point - and for the few times we have needed support, the turnaround time and quality of support has been good.  No complaints.

We used Jira initially for our internal Help Desk platform, but it fell far short of needs for the underlying service management workflows we employed.

I entered into already established estates, so was not exposed to the efforts in setting up the ServiceNow instance sets.

All has been in-house. We have full capabilities, as we do service implementations of ServiceNow for our clients and have invested in having internal development and support skills/capabilities.

We moved directly to ServiceNow for two reasons:

1. It was already the production ITSM platform for our US member firm who was given the (internal) contract to support our global management consulting business; and

2. We knew from our multi-year use of ServiceNow for (a) delivering IT Target Operating Model digital transformations to clients AND (b) delivering our Application Managed Services to external clients that this solution would easily meet our ITSM requirements.

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.

Microsoft Teams integration is available. Notifications are present within the virtual agent chatbot, integrated with third-party tools. All the portal features have been enabled, including the virtual agent installation.

There is a concern about the integration point of view, particularly the virtual agent. Currently, we are working on integration with Teams and the virtual agent. Now, the chatbot and portal are available. A pop-up message shows the redactions button if you click on anything in the chatbot conversations. This redirects to the portal. It should open, and the virtual agent should be integrated that way.

I have been using ServiceNow as a partner for two years.

There are some bugs in the solution.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

The solution is slow in performance level.

Technical support is good.

Positive

The initial setup is simple. It takes only eight hours for each resource because of integration and conversation flow.

From a developer's perspective, understanding the pricing of ServiceNow is crucial. Currently, pricing details are mainly available for account-related matters. However, if developers also have access to this information, it would greatly benefit them.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

We have several applications of the product, however, the main use case is to generate all the backlogs of the different squads where we assign histories and we can link this to concrete people. 

The histories and the tasks that we draft within the histories are used for creating all the burn charts in agile and to show the velocity of how well it was the last sprint in terms of shipments. This is the key purpose. 

We also use ServiceNow to log IT tickets and to trace them. Those tickets can be created directly as a ServiceNow history on the IT squads. This will go directly to their backlog. It is a quite nice interaction.

It's used to manage the sprint in agile to create all the backlogs and to activate the current sprints, to create the burnout charts of the velocity of the sprints, and also to register any IT-related support ticket requests.

When we join the task board we can have a main view that we use on the daily standups in the agile world. It is very easy to navigate across and to move histories around. 

It's great to do statuses or to review tasks. We can open them and get some details and updates. 

It is quite flexible as a system and is very visual.

It helps to keep the daily standards to 15 minutes.

Probably the backlog organization could be a little bit easier in terms of transversality between different squads. It would be nice if we could, with some specific access rights, move histories from one squad to another, as they generate dependencies or duplicate or flag them. We'd like to create dependency charts between different teams. This is something that Jira, for example, used to do very easily.

It would be ideal if there was some sort of Follow button to help users follow certain concrete task histories. That way, if you are following something, you could bet an immediate update when there is a change of status or a new comment or whatever.

In my current assignment, I've been working with ServiceNow since January. However, in the past, I used it from 2016 until 2019. This is my fourth year using ServiceNow.

The solution is stable. It always works. We haven't had any issues. In this case, no news is good news.

The solution is perfectly scalable. What they give you is the framework. In terms of functionalities, every client can customize it. It'll work well for different companies.

The product is widely used in the institution. Likely 90% of head office employees use it. 

I've never really needed technical support. I've used ServiceNow to request technical support on other applications. I was just handed over the minimum standards to use it, and then I learned by doing. It was quite easy.

With my previous client, I used Jira.

I cannot speak to the initial setup. When I started using the solution, it was already in place. I'm not an implementer of it. I'm an advanced user. Therefore, I can't speak to how simple or difficult the implementation process is.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we are currently using. We're likely using the latest as this is a big systemic bank. I'm pretty sure that they are continuously updated with the latest version.

I'm a user. I'm a consultant and scrum master, however, I use a lot of these tools also for agile management work.

This solution works if you invest a little bit of time in preparation. That said, that's the same for other vendors, like JIRA. You need to have efficient scrum cycles and organize them well. You should have efficient planning sessions and all the backlog should be already prepared, drafted, refined, organized, and prioritized. 

What is very important from inception, regardless of whether we're speaking about Jira or ServiceNow, is to have a very clear upfront plan of how you want to structure it. What is the kind of dependencies or links you want to create between different levels of access, for example?

I would advise users to prepare in advance the full strategy of configuration before they start doing anything. It is very hard to change later. You will create technical depth and will call out what you're not going to use. To roll them back once you've started is hard. It is worth it to take time, in the beginning, to try to forecast as much as possible. 

Overall, I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for IT service management and then we're using it for custom applications. That includes digitizing workflows and helping our company with that.

The solution was bought for ITSM and we have also bought the Pro package, meaning that we have particular AI capabilities, among other features, that are quite useful. 

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the possibility of the application development cap so that we can digitize workflows.

The solution scales well.

We've found the product to be quite stable so far.

When ServiceNow adds new features we have seen a tendency that they are very immature. They may release items too soon. In a company where you need to tweak and adjust, then I think there are so many improvements to be done.

If you have advanced questions, technical support often doesn't know the answer.

The stability has been good so far. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

We have five engineers on the solution, and then 375 users and 200 App Engine users.

The solution is quite easy to scale. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so relatively easily.

I've been in touch with technical support both directly and indirectly.

Their level of support is about the same as Microsoft. If you ask advances questions, however, it's difficult for them to help. They need to be more knowledgeable about the product itself - especially in regards to advanced features.

I would say that we are not completely satisfied with their level of service.

I didn't handle the initial implementation and I wasn't part of the team that did. I can't speak to how easy or difficult it was to implement or what the deployment process looked like. I'm not sure how long it took.

The solution is on the cloud and therefore doesn't require any maintenance.

The solution is a bit expensive. We have bundled it into our three licenses. It's difficult to actually say if they are more expensive than, for example, PowerApps, since everything is bundled together.

I've looked at PowerApps. I'd say that ServiceNow has smaller features. The pricing is likely the same.

We are customers and end-users of the solution.

I'd recommend this solution to other organizations.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

I'm the unit manager of the network operations center so I'm a core user of the tool. I don't get involved in the development, deployment or support of it, but we get a lot of tickets in the network operations center. I think probably some of the best things the tool brings to us revolve around the ability to manage all of our work. The intake of the work, tracking it and helping it move through the different processes so tracking incidents, then times they turn into a problem that we have to follow up and come up with a root cause.

For me as the manager of the network operations center, it's mainly around being able to track our work, know who is working on what, what our work volume is, how it ties to the different services that we support.

The reporting is one piece that's a lot of interest to me in the network operations center. We don't have a ton of metrics today mainly because we haven't put the effort in that direction, but we want to. I poked around on the reporting a little bit and I went to a session [at Knowledge16] on performance analytics. I thought, gee this looks like what I'm after but we have yet to purchase that module. I don't know if we will or won't so I guess I don't have enough experience to say. I see the potential there.

I think it's bringing a lot of stuff that's been handled by a lot of different applications and a lot of different areas in one place. We grew up with a few different areas which had their own tools for a long time for ticketing and managing assets. Basically bringing it all into one place I think is very beneficial.

I would say there really isn't anything I found that I really dislike. Now the caveat to that statement is we've been going at the deployment for a while. Again, I'm the user, the consumer side of the tool. What I'm waiting and watching to see is, as these new modules roll out, as we implement change and knowledge base, I've got myself and my group, we've got a lot of work to do yet just to learn the tool as it is today. We haven't really gotten into it far enough to say, "Gee I really don't like this."

The sense I get just from some of the classes that I've taken where I've been poking around in some of the tools that we don't have yet, I do see there's definitely a learning curve involved. Now I look at it like there's a learning curve involved in any new tool you bring into your organization. I think the overall pain of the learning curve maybe less when you have a common tool like the ServiceNow. If I get over the learning curve for problem management, for example, I'm probably halfway there with change, incident and the rest of them. A lot of things you're going to learn and want are applicable together. I think overall the total learning curve will probably be less.

I haven't had any issues. As a matter of fact since we've been using it, I can't think of one time where it was unavailable or had an issue. I haven't seen that as an issue from an end user perspective. I have it up periodically. The folks in my unit have it up all the time to monitor the queues and I haven't heard any issues with it.

I really haven't been involved in that side of it, we're the development side. From an end user, I think just as I've watched them enable more modules, bring on more things, I haven't noticed any kinds of performance issues.

We used BMC Remedy for ticketing system. We never really had a CMDB as we had various databases that housed different information so BMC Remedy, is the main one that comes to mind that we used prior to ServiceNow, that we'll be sun setting. We actually had some in-house tools as well that we developed.

We did so to manage things like our change records and actually that really was the formal IT CMDB if you will. We had some home-grown tools as well that we're working on sun setting.

There's another group in our organization that's responsible for the purchasing decisions. One of the things I heard that was maybe of concern to me, is that we had our in-house system that we used to communicate to our end user groups around change. I have some concerns about the ability in ServiceNow and the capability to notify end users of changes. I think if I was not mistaken that's in part due to licencing. We have about two thousand IT people versus total of about sixty thousand employees.

I believe there was a licencing cost issue around if I want all those people to be able to subscribe to change notifications. I don't quite understand how that works fully but I get the sense that there was maybe some cost challenges with that. From an end user perspective and the network operations center, we make a lot of changes that have the potential impact, large geographical areas and try to figure out how do to notify our end users. That's what I don't really know yet, how that ServiceNow tool is going to help us do that. We're still trying to figure that piece out.

One piece of advice I would give you from my perspective is that if you're going to deploy it, make sure you put the appropriate amount of effort into training the end users. I think there is some complexity learning how to navigate it and I think for a lot of people having a document to follow is challenging sometimes. Make sure you put the appropriate amount of emphasis on training. I've been in IT for about 26 years, I've seen a lot of this stuff grow up in pieces.

It's filling a niche I think a lot of people have really, really wanted which is bringing a lot of this information into one central location. The various areas of IT can no longer operate in a vacuum, it has to operate as one large cohesive IT department that aligns with the business. I think a tool like this helps bring a lot of that stuff into one place.

We used ServiceNow for change management, release management, and event management. We were also making use of the solution's CSI. The modules of ServiceNow were all available to you, and you could use them.

I have a problem with the way the solution's price is calculated.

I have been using ServiceNow for 10 to 13 years.

I rate ServiceNow an eight or nine out of ten for stability.

I would recommend ServiceNow for larger organizations. We used to have an organization with over 10,000 users. In our current organization, up to 3,000 users are using ServiceNow.

The solution’s technical support is fine.

We implemented the solution through an in-house team.

For us, ServiceNow was really good for keeping everything under control. Everything was documented, logged, and on point. The setup of creating things was quite straightforward.

The use and misuse of the CMDB is something important. Since CMDB should be the heart of everything you have, transforming the CMDB into a repository of information is good enough. If you don't use the full management tool, you can have problems. In three months, you will have to review the CMBD again, or you will have to update it once again in six months.

It differs from organization to organization. It will be taken care of in organizations that have clear processes in place. It's not about the tool but about the maturity of the organization using it.

We used to have lots of integrations with our systems to create tickets automatically. We also had some security related event management activities. When we requested to change something in ServiceNow, it was done rapidly in a couple of days.

Have some consultants that have worked with ServiceNow before, help you with the process. You should try to implement ITIL in your organization. If ITIL is not understood by the organization, then you cannot have expectations that they will follow the way of working as they should.

The solution's automation is quite straightforward. You just need to know what you want to automate. There are several ways to integrate stuff and several ways to have some triggers.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.