What is most valuable?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
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.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
