ServiceNow Reviews

From my standpoint, it's the process flexibility. We're at a really low maturity level, especially for the age of our company - we're about fourteen years old. From a service and support standpoint we're still in that one maturity level, idol-wise. It's been a blessing with ServiceNow to be able to nail down our various business processes. The support ones we weren't working and they were all over the place. 

ServiceNow was need to get everyone working the same way through tickets and requests. The ability to have something consistently flexible enough for us to put some structure in and get folks all working the same way across multiple departments, but still have the flexibility for them to feel like they're getting what they want when they're getting what we want.

We're anxiously awaiting setting up Helsinki for the health service portal. I think we were originally Fuji, and we did some custom branding and it was a nightmare. Designers got involved and it made it horrible. We've gone back to stock because we had seen what's coming with Helsinki. That's what I'm looking forward to with the customization.

We've been using it about a year and half now. My role is mostly as a sys admin and some development of the forms, requests and business rules.

Rock solid. We have a dev instance where only a couple of us work in development of a few things and ideas. Then in our production instance we do not yet have a mid-server or anything implemented. We're about to, but we are integrated with Centrify for some of the sign-on. From our support desk folks, it's been solid for them. Everybody gets what they needs. It's one of the things in our organization that always works.

I don't see it really being an issue. We probably have 80 odd idol license users from about 10 or 12 actual support desk folks, but there's also some folks doing project management and ERP. We have 3,500 odd employees, but they're not all going to be licensed users. We've got a lot of support corporate users. Scalability hasn't been an issue and I don't see it being one.

Very straightforward. It's almost point-click-done. You have to think a little bit, but that's mostly planning.

I recommend it to anyone to do any service management. 

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.

• Change
• Incident
• Service Catalog
• Configuration Management
• Project Portfolio Management
• Knowledge Base

• Improved the globalization of processes and around the clock service delivery to our customers
• Automated repetitive tasks and shifted left simple tasks to the service desk

• Lots of customizations can lead to breaking the system when moving to another release. This should be managed better by ServiceNow
• UI can be busy and complicated for non-IT users
• Difficulty in debugging and testing code output

I've used it for five years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

8/10

8/10

We used a different product, and switched because it was easier to set up and customize to the needs of our business compared to its competition.

A bit of both. It involved more customizations/work than we initially assumed.

Both. Have a dedicated resource(s) from in house that works with the vendor in developing and setting ServiceNow Modules/Applications. It's very important to use an experienced vendor team that has dealt with complexities in implementing a ServiceNow environment. You should also have clear functional requirements/functional specifications from the beginning before any ServiceNow development is done.

I’m a developer, so I wouldn’t classify the product as valuable to me, per se. However, through the eyes of a client I can tell you that ServiceNow is highly customizable, so when anybody asks, “Can it do this?”, the answer is usually, "Yes, yes it can."

The whole platform has improved our organization, but that is the beauty of ServiceNow. It provides a solid starting point to manage your IT operations, but not just IT operations, but almost anything your organization needs.

I've used it for three years.

It is usually user error rather than system error, and even on the largest deployment that I took part in, that was muddled by an inexperienced admin. I was able to back out and fix within a two hour span of time.

Stability is a complete non-issue. It is all cloud based and I have never experienced down time with ServiceNow.

I really don’t think there is anything out there that even compares.

This really depends on what the issue is. When you start venturing outside of the base system functionality, they will not support it. You essentially become the owner when you start modifying the base functionality.

That being said, the base functionality really doesn’t need to be modified. When customizing this product to suit your companies/organizations needs, developing solutions that lie within the base functionality are nearly always attainable.

I have used Cherwell, and while it works fine, it leaves a lot to be desired as far as user experience. I may be jaded because of ServiceNow, but managing data in Cherwell is nowhere near the capability of ServiceNow.

When an instance is spun up, it’s ready to use. In that case, setup is very simple, but no organization wants to keep the out-of-box-setup though. Why would you buy something so highly customizable and not customize it?

If you keep your customizations light, setup is not difficult for someone with a modicum of experience. If an organization goes all out and wants heavy customization, then setup can become extremely complex.

I work for a vendor, and typically the level of experience of in-house administrators/developers is rather low. We tend to incorporate them into what we are doing so as to raise their experience level, which allows them to support any solutions we implement.

Costs for consultants/developers, as I’m sure some of you know, can be pretty high. It’s not because ServiceNow is hard to configure, it’s because it’s so big that developers with an intimate knowledge of how the system functions and knowledge of the nuances are in short supply.

It is pricey, and for good reason. As far as licensing, I have one word: haggle. I have had clients pay full price for licenses and I have had clients who get lower prices for licenses or a certain amount of free licenses.

Also, for organizations that have busy seasons where additional licenses are needed for a few months, I have heard of those being comped so long as the number of licenses needed is within reason.

You should go play with it and learn how it works. You can get free personal developer/demo instance spun up at developer.service-now.com.

When it comes to the time to get your requirements ready you will be miles ahead and save money rather than blindly coming up with requirements, having a solution implemented, and then finding out you want to change 10% - 30% of what you originally thought you wanted.

Out-of-box end-user portal (this is highly customizable, and I’ve seen some pretty slick interfaces):

Fulfiller home screen:

Some of the base applications and list view of records:

Just an example of a custom application, I commission a fantasy
football league, and I built myself an application that utilizes web services
to pull in external data to help me manage my league as well as provide
statistics to help me set my lineup every week:

I'm in the public service sector, and it is used for public services. 

In terms of deployment, you normally buy ServiceNow on the cloud. You can also have it on-prem, but they're not very keen on giving you that option. So, more often, it is on the cloud, which is very difficult for my type of clients who are not based in America because ServiceNow Cloud is all on American hyperscalers.

It is important to route a ticket or service request to the right person. It needs to adhere to various standards, and ServiceNow is a very good product in this domain.

It is a very promising product. They have a new release every six months. They're investing quite a lot, and you can do many creative things with the product. If you know how it works, you can have stricter rules in the product.

Their user interface is old-fashioned and outdated, and it can be more friendly for the eye. They can improve the user experience.

We should be able to have different UI frameworks. Currently, they only do Angular, and sometimes, you can do React, but they can be more open-minded in this regard.

They are quite good in case management, but they can work more on case management. They can also adhere more to BPMN 2.0.

You need to know how to use it. You need to do a scope application. If you have everything on the same table, it gets slow. You need to know how the product works, and you need to adhere to the rules. Otherwise, it would become slow.

They have third parties that have competencies. It is not so easy to interact directly with the vendor because they have outsourced to their service partners and integration partners who know what to do. You also have communities taking your questions, but you mostly rely on the implementation partners. Other vendors have also followed the same approach where they produce the platform, and sub-parties produce the service.

It is quite straightforward, but you need an expert. It is a specialized tool.

The product is very good. They are growing a lot, and it seems that for them, it is about what to do first. Everyone wants to talk to them, and they are good, especially in the field of service processes and case management. I like them, but they're difficult to work with because they're very busy.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.

We use it for ticketing.

We haven't been using it long enough for me to say how it has improved our organization.

Creating a ticket is much simpler in this tool. That is one big advantage. Also, the simplicity and ease of use are much better. I've used HPSM and it is very complex in comparison to ServiceNow.

Change Management is the area I have found that this tool can be improved because there are so many fields which are missing, such as urgency of the customer request and how the priority is defined. These are some of the areas in which I found that BMC Remedy is much better than ServiceNow.

I haven't found many stability issues in this tool. The uptime is relatively good.

Scalability is not a big issue for this tool. It's good.

Technical support is an eight out of ten.

I was not part of the team or a decision maker for using this tool. I am an end user. It was purchased by our organization.

Other tools I have used and evaluated are BMC Remedy vs ServiceNow and Micro Focus Service Manager vs ServiceNow.

I would recommend looking into all aspects of ticketing tools and I would advise people to use BMC Remedy because of the scalability and the features available. If you are not very technical then I would recommend ServiceNow.

Most of the users of ServiceNow in our company are Level 1 and Level 2 engineers, and some of them are problem managers. We have more than 200 people using the tool.

I would rate ServiceNow at eight out of ten. The two points off are for some features which are not there in Change Management and in the ITSM software. The rating is as high as it is because of its simplicity and ease of use.

We use it for incidents, incident management, sales management, and problem management. We are very happy with the product.

We are about to upgrade to IT Service Management edition on September.

It enables communication. The benefit is that we can keep track of all the changes and the incidences.

We can keep track of incidences. There is a bucket where we keep all our information, and it enables communication between stakeholders. It helps us collaborate with each other.

We would like to have an Asset Management and/or Project Management feature enabled in this version and in the IT Service Management edition.

The Express edition does not allow the option for scripting.

It is very stable. We have only had five minutes of downtime in three years. 

Compared to other companies, we are small (270 people). Scalability does not affect us.

If it is a high priority, they will respond very quickly. If it is a low priority issue, it might take some time, some three or four days. I would rate the technical support as a 10 out of 10.

We didn't have another solution before ServiceNow.

The initial setup was straightforward, but we did some core customizations. Therefore, we did need more time to finish setting it up.

I would recommend it as a product.

Most important criteria when selecting a solution: 

• Stability
• Reputation in the market
• Is the product well-known?
• How long has the product been offered?

The ability to get in there and create stuff without worrying about setting everything up first. I like that we can get in there and kind of start developing right away, we don't have to worry about getting instances set up, we don't have to worry about getting everything provisional, all the networking stuff done, just get up and go.

Everybody can access it, and that's great. They take care of security.

They seem to be answering a lot of our problems that we've been having in trying to control the development, trying to control our other developers, and it sounds like they're giving us that. I definitely want to see Scoped get built out more though, it's great that they've got the Scoped functionality but, I want to make sure that we're able to do all of the same things we're able to do in the global inside the Scoped applications as well.

I've been using ServiceNow for about three or four years, but I've really been developing in it for about two years.

We've never really had too many issues and anything we have had has been self-inflicted, so it's not ServiceNow's fault.

I don't even know that we've had too many issues with trying to scale anything, it comes right ready for everybody to access it in the company. The only thing I would say we've encountered, we've come up with our own creative ways to kind of prevent certain people from accessing things. It's really scalable, it comes ready to go for the whole enterprise.

I think they're pretty decent. Sometimes you have to finagle their help best to get the right answers. We've had to escalate some issues before but for the most part we've gotten everything taken care of.

It's pretty straightforward, and every now and then we have to go in and make some changes, but really it's not that big of a deal and it kind of helps us keep modernizing our stuff too, so not so bad.