ServiceNow Reviews

• Work intake 
• Project management 
• Project for a 30 person marketing and communications team at a Big 4 professional services firm.
  

• It helps improve service levels and reduce team stress.  

• It provides internal clients with greater transparency about their projects and deliverables.

• Ability to configure a service catalog with defined SLAs.

• Single window for all work requests.
• Ability to bundle various deliverables into a single project work request.

None.

None.

We used a homebrew solution developed by (and for) our IT department. It was far too complex for marketing users.

The setup was time-consuming and required a lot of internal resources. 

We used an in-house team.

The IT department conducted a vendor evaluation, but I am not aware of which solutions were considered.

It is a very robust tool. We use it for all back office teams in the firm, resulting in a common interface and intake process across HR, IT, Marketing, and Finance.

I think the most valuable feature is just the ability to take the whole organization and put it in one place. Traditionally, my background has been in service desk, and so someone who call with a problem and we would deal with it. If it was outside of that scope, it was outside of our system, and so we had to go to someone else's tracking system or someone else's system of record. With ServiceNow, all of a sudden if someone calls us with a facilities request, we don't have to just palm them off and say, "Call this number." We can go into the facilities app and say, "Oh, here's how you get your work order done. Here's how you handle this type of request." It just enabled us to see the whole organization as a single organization, which, especially for higher ed and places like that, just doesn't happen. Everybody has their own little silos, and this gave us a chance to unify that.

Traditionally people saw different facets of IT as different areas of responsibility, so incidents were handled by one group, and problems were handled by another, but they never really called them that. They just called them "tickets," or they called them "emergencies," or they called them whatever they did, and so looking at ITSM, you can look at sort of a workflow of a thing, and so enough incidents becomes a problem, and problems need change, and that sort of thing, and so for us, it was not just about, "We need a better way to track stuff," but it was, "We need a better way to see how that workflow works so that people other than just the folks in the trenches doing the work can see how that works and see how the organization works together," so again, for us, it was about unification. It was about seeing that it was everybody's problem, and not just whoever was holding the baton at a certain time.

The biggest hassle we have for ServiceNow has been licensing. We have a lot of student workers. When you have cheap labor that's right at your doorstep, you can't turn them down, and so we have a lot of functions at the university, not just in service desk, but also in housing and in customer support, that is handled by student workers that don't work all the time. They work ten hours a week, or they work five hours a week, but they consume the same type of license as an eighty-hour-week employee, and because of that, in some departments, it's prohibitively expensive to use ServiceNow, because if you have a hundred student workers that are only working ten hours a week, you have to pay for a hundred idle licenses, and that can be a huge speed bump into getting them to adopt it, whereas with our other platforms it was concurrent licensing, and we could just buy a bucket of licenses and hand them out.

There are some initiatives to improve that, but for right now, that's still a big stumbling block for us is, that's really stopping our momentum is, we go to a department, we give them a great pitch, and they ask for the price, and it really is a big issue.

We went live just over a year ago, and we had a fairly quick implementation period, so we had only used it for a few months prior to that, as far as building it, and that sort of thing, so just under two years.

In fact, it solved a lot of those issues for us, because our Remedy implementation was all on-prem, so we had database servers we had to update, we had Tomcat servers. We had every other kind of thing, and not enough staff to run them, and so it really was an effort whenever we had to bring a service outage back that we didn't know sort of what was happening. Same thing with upgrades. You had to coordinate several people, and it was a lot of effort, whereas now it's literally just, "Hey, we need to do a patch this weekend, so let change know that we're doing a patch," and in the morning the patch would be there, and so from our standpoint, that was really the biggest thing, is that we haven't seen the issues now that we saw previously. As far as implementation, uptime, we really haven't had any problems.

We used BMC's Remedy product, but it was traditionally call tracking, and so it really didn't unify it under any sort of framework. It was just call tracking and knowledge, and so ServiceNow gave us an opportunity to see it, just to open the world of ITSM up, we hadn't been exposed to before, and see that you could actually bring all that stuff together in one place and resolve it more efficiently.

The technical aspects of it were fairly straightforward. We knew we wanted to change, and so never let a good crisis go unused, and so we knew we were changing products, and we wanted to change philosophies too, so we didn't spend a lot of time making ServiceNow look like Remedy, and that helped out, but what it also meant is that we hit a lot of resistance from people that had to move towards that new product, that it didn't look like the old stuff, and so from a technical standpoint, I had a top-notch architect, and he came in and he knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew how he wanted to do it, and so when we went to the customers, that was really the issue is, they wanted more of a vote, they wanted it to look like their view of how it looked, so technically? No, very easy. Politically, sort of new process, sort of point of view, it was a little bit harder, but the technical aspect's very easy to handle.

I would have them analyze their business and see if they had the drive to move to a system like ServiceNow. ServiceNow was a huge jump for us because it was seeing the world differently, and some universities, particularly smaller ones, don't have the willpower to make that jump, and so what I would tell them is, "There is a lot of potential here, and if you're ready for it, grab it with both hands, and just do it, but if you're not, back off." I mean, they have the ServiceNow Express that's sort of a light way to get into the system, but I think my advice would be, to do your due diligence. Make sure that your organization is invested, and it's not just a couple of people who want to buy a new package, and when you're ready, go for it. There's a huge community that can back you up, and there's a lot of support that you can get, but if you're not, then don't waste your time and everybody else's moving to a system that you might not be ready for.

It all goes back to potential that it is a platform. It is not just, "Here are your round pegs, and here's our square hole. Do the best you can." It's really, it's got the potential to do a lot of good. There are some things that I have issues with because I don't think higher education is a demographic that ServiceNow is really comfortable with yet, and so there are problems there that they don't realize, like the student thing.

I think once they get the higher ed stuff more up to speed, and they've got SIGs now, and they've got panels, and that sort of thing, so I think they're getting there, but for right now, it's not really a demographic they focused on, and so I'd like for them to pay more attention to that.

I use ServiceNow for analytics, but my team uses it for incident management. Those are the two most valuable things that we use it for.

I'd like to see improvement in their mobile space just because that's certainly my priority. I'll also like to see improvements more in their reporting in analytics still. I think they're getting there, but I'd like to see a little bit more from what they have right now.

We've been using ServiceNow for two years.

Perhaps we only had one issue that I can remember that we had a downtime, but other than that it's been very stable and very consistent.

It's still to be determined. In fact, I need to find out if it scales specifically for mobile devices. We have thousands and thousands of mobile devices out there around the world, and so we're trying to see if we can implement ServiceNow to scale to that number.

It was implemented by our engineering group, so my supports go straight to them. My understanding is that our solutions manager owns the product. My understanding is that he gets good support from ServiceNow, but direct support from ServiceNow, I don't directly do that. I go through our engineering group for that.

We were using HPE Service Management, but it was cumbersome. It was really not user-friendly. ServiceNow helped us, plus added value of workflow. We use a lot of workflow as well. We use that. That was the greatest value for that.

I didn't set it up for our organization, or I think my team didn't set it up, but for our instance for our group, it was seamless. The migration of data has been seamless for us as well. At least, that was our experience in our department. There's multiple departments, it's my organization. The data, the which one was the biggest one, transitioning from the old HPSM to the ServiceNow has been consistent and very good.

I recommend the product and I think there's potential for it. For the features that we have now, it's been day and night difference from what we've had.

The ability to manipulate or customize all of the underlying structure.

That's a really hard question because their target audience is so diverse. They've got everything from medical to university and everything in-between. For me personally, I would say all these new features, these new things that they're doing are awesome, but I want documentation on what they're doing on the underside, what they're doing behind the scenes. I think I'm honestly in the minority with that. I think most people want to just get some admins and have them be able to do everything that a developer can do. I would say as far as marketing or sales, I would say they're probably going in the right direction. Enabling the admins to do more and more and more, while locking down, so they don't muck around and screw stuff up.

I've used it for four years.

It doesn't crash. They have a terrific up time, but I would expect that when you have four redundancies, that goes without saying. I would say that for the things that I like to do, which is muck around in the underlying, I would say that it's going downhill.

The most recently released Geneva locked up a bunch of stuff. A good example is UI16. There's a bunch of stuff that's undocumented and it's locked away. It makes it very hard to get to. I would say that's a definite negative.

As far as I'm aware, it scales beautifully. You just throw another stack or two or 20 at it and off you go. We make a lot of custom apps, custom modules, which is why I muck around in the underside. As far as that goes, for scalability the sky is the limit.

They're a funny group. I've never had a ticket that I've submitted to support that was answered by the initial person that received it. It usually ends up going to their tier two or in some cases, the developer. I don't know how to answer that question because the questions I ask are very hard. I've been doing it for a long time. I'm sure that the support team is fantastic for someone that's new to the product or hasn't used it before but for me it's a bit of a rigmarole.

Actually, it's very complex. Usually, you're doing it with a partner. Most institutions have partnered with someone to help them with an implementation. How well it goes is usually on the implementation engineer or their team's shoulders. I have gone through an implementation that was just horrific and we made it work. I've seen implementations that go fantastic. You just turn a key and there it goes. I would say it really depends on the quality of your implementation engineer.

I would ask about the use case. What are you trying to solve? What are you trying to do? Then I would advise based on their feedback provided and their budget. Some budgets are very small and I don't know if they would work with this solution.

I like the adaptability and the flexibility of the tool. We've had a number of ideas, "Hey, I wish there was a way we could do this." and "Oh, well, let's make that happen." Then very quickly we were able to figure out a way to make it work and now there's a way we can make that happen. That's the best thing about it.

I think the biggest thing that I've seen is when we've moved to the knowledge-based version three, which happened relatively recently, there were a lot of new improvements that came with that, but there were a lot of things that actually seemed like a little bit of a step back. What we're hoping is that some of that's just like, "We wanted to present you with this new tool and we're going to add some of these things back in later on." There's a lot of the flexibility that we've come to expect from ServiceNow that seem to be gone in that new version.

I've personally used it for about three years.

We have the occasional problems with slowness, but I can't remember a single instance where it's been completely down.

For the foreseeable future, I think it's what we're going to stick with.

The support's been excellent. Our local rep has been excellent and I haven't personally reached out to technical support or anything, but I have been using the community and that's been great to have. The Wikis is an excellent resource so there's a lot of resources out there.

I wasn't there in our initial setup but our upgrades have been relatively painless.

I would absolutely recommend it. We're a little bit of a unique case in a lot of ways because we were on ServiceNow a couple years ago and we actually moved away from it, because we're running Salesforce for the rest of our university for case management. There was a mandate that we wanted everything to be in Salesforce, so we actually moved away from ServiceNow to Remedyforce. It was a disaster and about a year later we moved back to ServiceNow. I think it's an interesting demonstration of the fact that it's such a good product that even after we moved away from it we came back.

A lot of pain and tears went into that migration. We didn't really want to do another migration eight months later, but it was so worth it to do it. It's absolutely worth the investment of time and effort to do it.

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.

For me, the most valuable feature is the platform aspect - the ability to create custom apps and even tailor the existing ones to your company's needs. Each organization is a little bit different. We all do ITIL. We all speak ITIL, but ITIL can mean different things in different organizations, and that's really the core power in ServiceNow is you can make it what you need it to be.

I think that the biggest benefit is the ability to consolidate apps. For example, my background is actually in maintenance, so we would have three, four, or five different applications that we had to use for just performing routine maintenance on equipment. ServiceNow allows you to consolidate those apps into a single platform, so you can consolidate your skillsets. You've got a few developers that know the ServiceNow platform. Now those few developers can help you build and maintain all those apps rather than having different skillsets across.

The big area of improvement that I see is in the licensing model for the CreateNow app. There are huge opportunities. Right now, ServiceNow is still largely consolidated primarily to IT. They started expanding to HR. They've started expanding to legal, but developers like myself, I've got lots of ideas for apps. As I said, my background is in maintenance, so I see the opportunity for the platform, and we really need to get the CreateNow licensing simplified to a way that even ignorant little old me can figure out.

I've been using the platform for four years.

Honestly, I've been extremely impressed, especially as time has gone on. I was on the platform before the high availability came around, and so I want to say it was Knowledge 12. I was actually working for a company on the IT operations desk using ServiceNow. I was in the middle of a session and got called out because ServiceNow went down, and even before high availability, we had a backup pretty quickly. I was able to go break back into my session and get back to it, so now, with high availability, I can't recall a moment since where I have actually seen an instance truly down where the instance itself was down.

There have been problems with applications, but even then, we've hot-patched on the fly to fix issues. It's just so agile at getting back to operational.

I think that's part of the problem is that the common answer whenever I'm asked, "Okay. Well, if we do this, how much is it going to cost?" My response to the client is usually, "You're going to have to talk to your ServiceNow sales rep." For a company where so much is based on that, that quick response, jump online, get your service, get the services you need right away, it's a little frustrating sometimes when you're dealing with the licenses, and it's like, "Wouldn't it be great if there was a service catalog for this?"

My advice would be if you're looking, trying to bill, or looking to go with a single niche app and you just want to spend it off and go with it, then by all means, pick whatever app you're looking at. If you're looking for something that you can bring into your organization to be more than just a single purpose, if you are looking to truly transform your organization with the tools that you're using, ServiceNow is the go-to.

As an integrator, I think that what I like the best about ServiceNow is the flexibility that it gives me as an app writer, or a third party developer who can come in and integrate their services into ServiceNow. I think the flexibility and the ease with which I can do it is the best aspect for me. I think it's the way it's architectured. I think it's a very, very, well architectured platform, and that's the strength of ServiceNow. The platform which they architectured in a way which is very open, which is very customizable, which is very flexible.

Cloud is the way to go, and SaaS is the model that is being adopted. It's cutting edge technology with tons of languages which ServiceNow is coming with, and that's what we use. At least from our perspective, there's a lot of similarity in the ServiceNow platform and our platform. We've tried to integrate with other people but it's been very, very hard because they generally are a very closed system that's very difficult to integrate using their APIs or exposing our APIs. With ServiceNow, it's very easy to do that and with the kind of custom APIs that ServiceNow has, especially in the employee space, I think that's a win-win situation for us to be on ServiceNow to actually target these customers. I think that gives us a tremendous amount of value.

I'm not an expert ServiceNow user, as we've only used it for our integration with them. In fact, I have not really come across something that I would say is a problem because I've worked with other people and it's certainly better than that. There always is scope for improvement, and I think most of it is targeted with their Helsinki release. The UI, the UX, the click and drag options to do certain things, it just adds to the more modern feel on the platform.

Since I work mostly on the application development side and I know they're focusing a lot to bring that up. Still there are a lot of restrictions, what developers like to see in an environment they're developing. Such as: you've made a change, I've made a change, can I compare and merge what the change is since we are both developers? I don't have that, I do see what's going on but I don't see. When I have ten developers, it's kind of a little challenge to see who's written what. So there are commercial grade application tools, and I understand ServiceNow is not an IDE, they're not a platform which was built as an IDE but I think that's one idea that if they enhance where I can actually keep track of who's doing what and can I merge two files, can I discard changes from his file and just keep my file? Those kind of changes would really help.

With those of whom I have spoken to as ServiceNow admins or those who manage ServiceNow for the company, they've found it relatively easy just to manage it and from a stability perspective and from a scalability perspective I think it's stood up really well.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Most of our customers that we go to already have ServiceNow deployed. They have a team that manages it so I don't know how difficult or easy it is for them but they did give us an environment to work on and I think that's where we come in as an integrator with our product on it. If your question is specific to ServiceNow I really wouldn't know whether it's a problem for them to manage it or upgrade it.

There are other commercial products out there, there are home grown systems out there, but they're not architectured to be extensible. They're not architectured to allow people from outside to come in with their offering and say, "I can marry my offering with yours and this is what it looks like". They just don't have that capability so we'd really have to behave like two separate systems even if we offer that service.

First of all, I think you have to really think if ServiceNow is a fit for them. As long as they can define what they're doing and somehow link it to service, because ultimately it's a service. In fact, doing any kind of service then this is the platform to go with because this is a platform that can fit into your business processes rather than trying to change your business processes just to use a platform. The benefit comes from the fact that, are you trying to provide a service and is that service very specific to your organization and does your organization work in a specific way. If it does then this is the platform to go with because now you can tune the platform for your business rather than trying to change your business to somehow use the platform you know. So I would suggest that.