ServiceNow Reviews

I think realistically, it helped us better our processes. It forced us into adopting best practices. We were in a bit of a tech island, and so we kind of do our own thing. To get everyone in the same system, behaving the same way, looking at work the same way, it helped bring everyone on the same page and to adopt better ITIL practices.

We're a few generations back, we're on Eureka. We've had some vendors initially help us out. We've been through about four different vendors over the three and a half years. Some of that code has been problematic for us. We're looking to get to the Geneva release. A lot of this social type computing is really interesting to us.

I'm going to a Hackathon today, and I'm looking at a "Like" feature for managers. Often in IT, we're not front and center of projects, we don't get the spotlight. When we do things that keep the system up and running for the users, no one sees that. We want to say, "Well we're doing the work in the system." Our managers can go look at that, like it, high five, that kind of thing. We're looking at that kind of Facebook style, or social media style, view into their work and actually interesting to deep diving into the data and showing what our stats are like.

We just did our three year renewal in January so about three and a half years from implementation to production.

We've never had it go down or connect. Most times people say ServiceNow is down, it's because our network isn't available, so it's typically not us. You can flip the WiFi on your phone and say, "Okay, that's not ServiceNow." It's been really good.

We've been pretty consistent from day one. We've used more and more modules, and as people are getting more comfortable with the platform, we're trying to tie more functionality into it, but it's been reasonable for what we're doing.

It's pretty good. I can say that for some things, obviously you can't know everything and we can't find everything, but they've been doing better and better with that. Usually, when I do ask a question, they're pretty good at saying, "Okay, well here's where to go," or, "Okay, that's legitimate. Here's how to solve it." It's usually within a week or two that our issues can be resolved. If they're not critical, it's reasonable for us.

There's a lot there, it's like Excel. You can go in any which direction and you got two different ways to do it or multiple ways of doing things. It was a steep learning curve for us. We went through a number of vendors until we were able to fish on our own. Now we can go to specific people and then get those targeted information. It's been really good for us to have the user groups, local user groups, the snugs, and pick the brains of other companies who are having the same challenges or working on the same projects we are. Then we can collaborate a little bit and make sure that we're doing what makes sense. It's not just us in our own little sandbox.

Definitely understand a bit about ITIL best practice and what that is. We had a gentleman come in about three months before ServiceNow was brought in. He actually ran a mock help desk scenario with business asking things and with the knowledge base being put in typical back end of the level two support. We played the game several times, reorienting where all the knowledge is, where their work was done, and all of a sudden, I had a bird's eye view of how work should be done. As we were implementing ServiceNow, all the decisions and all the modules we put in place laid out to support that foundation that we'd seen. Whereas our initial approach was let's just put in there blank for like all the systems that we have. We wouldn't have leveraged a lot the best practices and things that we'd seen in the game that would've really helped us out. We would've had to rebuild it after the fact. Really understanding, see where you want to be and then build the tool up from there.

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.

I like the out of the box module processes like the incident problem change. Currently, I think the most powerful features are discovery, orchestration, the business map of the relationships, and building applications for business. The business applications has been in place for a year, and we have new customers, so we want to make business applications not only for IT but for other departments in the company.

With it, I can do everything. I have some questions, requirements, from the customers. I never say to the customer, "I can't do it." That's because I can do everything, so I think only our imagination can be the limit of ServiceNow. Even if something doesn't work now, I know that in the next few months it will.

From the customer perspective, I think the most important aspect is that they know what they're paying for. They pay once a year which makes it easy to plan financially. They know the costs of using ServiceNow, because you don't need extra resources, servers, backups etc. as everything is in the cloud.

From my perspective as a partner, I can do everything with ServiceNow so I don't stress about telling a customer during a meeting that I can do something even if I think I can't. Everything is possible and it's only limited by the imagination of myself and the developers.

I think that it goes too fast sometimes and they have too many releases too often. Sometimes there are bugs, maybe not making it unstable, but we need to change some customer customizations. For example, there are problems with the performance, so if ServiceNow is changing something such as data centers there can be issues. Availability is perfect of this platform. Genius, as I said at the beginning.

The only bugs are related to the configuration, not from the ServiceNow side, but from the partners that are doing something because they don't understand how it works.

It's small issues. Not a big impact for production instances and for the current work.

I worked with HP Service Manager. I know that BMC Remedy is quite similar in functionality to ServiceNow. They are trying to be in the same space but with HP Service Manager, I know there is a problem. For example, my previous company decided to go forward with ServiceNow as it had a service catalog. The Service Catalog functionality wasn't working in HP Service Manager, so they decided to switch to ServiceNow.

It depends. From my perspective, it's easy, I am a system architect, and I think from a customer perspective it's easy as well. I can see a new custom application created in a simpler way, for building applications, etc. but I'm usually only using the basic functionality, which I started to work with at the beginning because it's easier and I know that I can control it. From the user perspective, I can see that they are adding new forms to configure everything.

It's genius and there is no risk from the IT manager perspective. The management team of a company isn't at risk either and the future is always promising.

You can be sure that if you invest in ServiceNow the entire company will be happy. Always have a good partner to develop the instance and everything will be fine. For IT management, it's not risky to experiment with ServiceNow.

I would give it a ten. It's the best, from my perspective, especially compared with the IT systems I've worked with before.

I like the flexibility on ServiceNow. We use it for our help desk admin and our call center, but we also use it for our knowledge management system. Right now our knowledge management system is our growth area. We get to add our custom homemade apps plus some of the other vendor apps, to integrate into that to get our total package that we need. We have multiple enterprise applications so we're moving data back and forth between all of them all the time, so ServiceNow is great for that part.

Previously we used some other applications, some are homemade, some not, but as they updated the applications, they didn't keep up with how our actual strategy and how our organization worked with. So far we've been with ServiceNow for many years and every time they've had an update, it's been fairly seamless for us.

Somehow if there was a roadmap for ServiceNow to show all of the different business domains and everything and what may be included and what you have or what might could be upgraded to support you in those areas. Show me a roadmap and I'll look at different business processes and how ServiceNow would handle those.

We've only had network issues, and we've never had any latency issues. It's always just if the network is down is our only problem. We have had bugginess, but we're going to get too technical for me. It's part of the integration between ServiceNow and Genesis and IVR. There were some issues but they were very technical in nature.

The scalability is fine.

I don't have direct experience with them. I have six coordinators and two of them in particular work really well with ServiceNow. If they've had an issue or had a question, they've had it corrected, resolved fairly quickly.

I've used BMC Remedy which I hate, and the others were just homemade.

The complexity was not complex for ServiceNow, it was just wrapping our heads around it. We have over 120 different platforms and variations of those and we have probably 300 core sites, so to be able to pull together everything we wanted for our ticking system and to relate that with knowledge management was just a challenge for us to pull our process together.

You should look at ServiceNow and at the business processes. If a roadmap was available it would be very easy for you to choose one and implement that first, and as they go along pick up another one.

We have our own development groups so obviously we can customize stuff well, where others probably can't, so I prefer my custom apps, but if I take that away I'd probably give ServiceNow an eight and a half, or nine. I consider my custom apps probably seven and a half. I need to learn also how to integrate some of our custom apps to start working within ServiceNow and those too. That's a short fall in my experience.

Because I do IT planning and program management, the project portfolio management part is most helpful and useful, but I can also see the integration to other parts of the IT operation as well. I think that's most useful because we are looking from an end-to-end perspective within the IT organization, though we may have different functional teams, but we are working as one team, so it's important that the various operations or processes are tied and integrated into one platform, in one end-to-end process.

I can see a very good product strategy. We see enhancements or enhanced features in each of the releases. I see the roadmap is good and the technology underneath is also good.

During the Knowledge16 conference, I found out more about the IT financial management part, which is important to me because we're trying to do more finance on our IT operations so that we can measure performance. We can also share info with our business shareholders and stakeholders as well. I see those features as really useful when we transform our IT organization into a service organization.

In our region we don't have many choices of implementation partners. At the same time, I don't see that they are as proficient as they are in other regions.

Today we aren't seeing major issues but one of our concern is that it's expensive.

Not at this company, but beforehand I had used Remedy. It is a very traditional IT Service Management tool, basically a help desk, but I think there's a lot more in ServiceNow.

The underlying technology and also the application or customization facility, or the technology behind ServiceNow actually is quite robust and quite agile, which we can make use of to do a release and deliver it quickly.

We're using Deloitte as our implementation partner. They are doing a fantastic job, but they're just one particular resource, one or two that can help us, but in our region, we don't have many choices on partners that are proficient in ServiceNow as well as in IT operations.

We are trying to do it in a phased approach, we want to have the initial system for us, and then we'll use it and improve-enhance it later on. I don't see that we'll have major issues, because our goal is not to have it all in one step, but rather we are evolving our solution.

I do not have particular details, but what I heard from my boss is that it's not a cheap solution, especially when you want to roll out to more people or more colleagues in an organization. That is really a significant factor we're considering because in terms of the cost it's not cheap, so we hesitate. We can see a lot of scalability and expansion possibility in rolling out beyond the IT organization.

Over the two years that we've had ServiceNow up and running, we've had a couple of service interruptions. Other than that, no. Some kind of network problem they were having, they had to fall back into a different data center, and that took about 15 minutes, I wish it was a little bit seamless, but we've had a couple of glitches.

The ability to add more users to the system itself, what we have done is we've linked it to our active directory, and that's where we're importing the user information from, and that's been working great for us.

Our company is basically a group of companies, it's not just one company, so our IT infrastructure and department and the way we operate is very fragmented. One of our goals is to combine them into one enterprise.

We are actually using about 26 different ITSM tools and we are in the process of eliminating them all. Over the past two years we have been able to get rid of five of them, and we're continually working towards off-lining the rest as well. The biggest one that we currently use is Maximal, I believe IBM uses that, that's who we deal with, and it's still there.

I wasn't with that company when they were implementing it, so I'm not exactly sure. As I was joining them, they were deploying their first module which was the incident module. Others have been very easy since I've been there, they did knowledge, they did change, and they developed a custom application, which after a little while ServiceNow provided free of charge, so that was kind of always, but we're still using the custom one. As far as deploying and developing goes within ServiceNow it's very easy, not painful at all. The only pain point for us is because we're a group of different companies, our collection of requirements is a little bit lengthy, it requires a little bit more work than other companies. The incident module itself alone is very complex because we have several service desks at several locations and fairly complicated.

I would advise you to stay out of the box as much as possible. I know it is very difficult to do that, but if you stay out of the box and go with minimum customization it would be the best, because when you upgrade to the next version, our next release or example, we will encounter issues if you have customized it, and you'll have to fix that. Also as far as testing goes, try to automate it. Because that's right now a challenge for us, a regression test.

I find the product to be valuable because even before they started really pushing it as a platform as a service, that is the biggest reason as to why I leaned towards its purchase two years ago; it's platform as a service. We didn't really purchase it as a SAS product. It's valuable to us because we do a lot of custom development on the platform.

We could have chosen many different platforms but for lack of a better word, it was the easiest to be able to move to, taking all of our existing processes and data from different sources. It was born in the cloud so we didn't have to worry about all of the nuances of being able to ensure that it would work as a cloud application. That was a big piece and it already had a service, although rudimentary, a service portal available with it. I think in the previous versions it's referred to as an ESS portal. With Fuji on forward I think they refer to it as a service portal.

If you look at the number of support calls that we put into ServiceNow, it's absolutely minimal because we filter. We don't have our users calling into ServiceNow directly and we trained our users, etc. I don't really see the value, monetarily, from what we're spending from a support perspective. Because if we call into ServiceNow it's because we're experiencing something at a much higher level, not something that is an easy fix. It's usually we've recognized performance issues or something like that. Their up time has been satisfactory for the most part.

For the most part, the product is very stable. We host customers ourselves and we know how difficult it is. As a host provider you're not completely 100% in control of everything, you're dependent on other vendors to be up.

We've had three major upgrades since we implemented and there have been no issues. A lot of that has to do with the fact that we followed a very regimented custom development best practice so that we wouldn't interfere with any of their upgrade processes.

It does not necessarily scale from a licensed user perspective, we don't grow as much because our license users are really just our core set of resources within our company that's internal. From an external customer perspective, our customers are international/worldwide, so we have folks from Africa, Singapore, London accessing the system. We went from an initial 8,000 users to double that amount from an external customer.

We also continue to use our own application that we develop which supplements ServiceNow.

We had a lot pushing us to go very fast so we implemented ServiceNow in less than a 90-day period once we actually started progressing to actual implementation. Some portions of just deciding upon the product and all of that took much longer, but once we procured the product and actually set on our way to implement, in less than 90 days we were live.

Advice to peers: It would depend on the problems they're trying to solve. It really would depend on the problems they're trying to solve. As an ITSM solution, I would highly recommend it, first choice. For something else, it would depend.

Our primary use case is comprehensive reporting for our business and our regulators.

We began by extending ServiceNow capabilities within IT, which gave us a clear understanding of what we could do with it, and then expanded from there. We had many business processes that ran on legacy systems and spreadsheets. That created unacceptable risk and cost. That means we can focus on core functionality rather than having to build all of the application scaffolding and platform capabilities by ourselves

ServiceNow is the central hub for our data services. It takes in orders from our front-end CRM system and drives end-to-end fulfillment workflows. That starts with entitlements, which is checking whether a customer has all the necessary contracts in place. For example, if we’re providing access to third-party content, does the customer have appropriate contracts with the content vendor?

Then, we use ServiceNow to orchestrate the actual technical fulfillment process. This includes ordering circuits to connect to the customer’s premises and configuring our own backend systems, which ties into our core IT processes on ServiceNow. Once the service is up and running, ServiceNow provides reporting and notifications to support billing and financial forecasting.

ServiceNow gives us a lot for free: workflows, organizational structures, service portal, forms, reporting, disaster recovery, and so on. That means we can focus on core functionality rather than having to build all the application scaffolding and platform capabilities by ourselves. That saves us at least 50% on development effort, and because we’ve got a consistent platform framework, we also get a lot of reuse. That makes it easy to consolidate and retire applications built on legacy tools.

For example, Lotus Notes; we can modernize and save costs. In fact, since we started out, we’ve built more than 20 custom ServiceNow apps and our team is still fewer than 10 people, including QA.

Integration capabilities can improve. ServiceNow has a roadmap, however, native integrations in addition to the citizen-developed scopes would be ideal.

The pricing seems confusing, with the integration hub being most confusing.

I believe our firewall rule change request form is a custom form, but it has a serious drawback. If I submit such a request and need to make a correction to it before it is approved, there isn't any way for me to do so. The request has to first be rejected with the creation of a sub-task in order to edit it before it is resubmitted for approval.

We have been using ServiceNow for two years.

Stability-wise, this product is very good.

The scalability is good.

The technical support is very good.

This is a SaaS product. The customization and development of custom apps bit time-consuming.

Our deployment was vendor assisted. It was expensive but good.

I am not in the finance department; however, incident reporting and resolution have been much better.

The setup cost is high compared to others, especially when the scope is not fixed.

We looked at several options and decided that ServiceNow was the best choice. And it was because the rollout was highly successful.