ServiceNow Reviews

Immediate insight into reporting. For us it's about trying to wrap our heads around the volume of tickets that are coming in the door. How quickly we're getting our turn time done? Those were things that were missing from our incident management platform. We could basically do a data dump once a week, dump that into an Excel spreadsheet, then do some computation on the side, and get those numbers out.

With ServiceNow, we're able to generate those reports daily. We can get that feedback almost immediately. We just started turning on performance analytics as well. That's one of the reasons I'm here [at Knowledge16], is to take the courses to learn more about performance analytics. We're really looking forward to that, to get it in more real time, and provide dashboards.

It was all on Fuji. Some of the things I'm going to say might already be in Geneva and Helsinki. We use a zipper product for our project management portfolio, demand management and resource planning. From what I have heard, and what I've seen thus far, resource management needs to be a little tighter. We're running performance models around capacity planning. We need to know: How many resources are in play? How many hours are they actually working? What's the requirement for all those resources on those different pieces? How does that lay against what we're allocating?

I can't have resources available for 45 hours a week, and then deploy them against 60 hours, and they only turn in 37 hours. The resource planner we have today actually calls out those discrepancies. I'm hoping that with performance analytics this will too. I haven't seen a lot of that in play yet because I think it's still fairly new for them. I think if you're going to run your IT shop like a business, you really need that kind of insight.

The other thing we do is we report out against three different modalities in our IT shop. 1. You got to run the shop. 2. You've got to maintain the business to keep the doors open. 3. You got to grow the business. There's some fancy math that you have to do against what people are doing, and how they're deploying their time to roll that back into one of those three categories. With the current system we have, there's a way of doing data masking and manipulating it so that way you can form these common buckets. I don't know that this will do that, I hope it will.

With ServiceNow, you have to do a lot of manipulation ahead of time to get to what that end state is. That said, coming to the conference and playing with Geneva, and playing with Helsinki, I've got a slightly different opinion. I'm pushing my guys to move from Fuji directly to Helsinki. Just because it does allow me to set those records up the way I want to quickly, as opposed to playing with the report to get that structure right. The only way I can describe it is, if you really enjoy building formulas, and data drops, and pivot tables, and having all that, and then analyzing the data, Fuji is great. Excel is also great for that, but it's not what I want to do. I want to actually analyze the data.

I've been using it about six months.

It's one of the few systems we have in our house that hasn't gone down. It's very stable. As a matter of fact, we don't even put it on our availability list because it's up.

We're currently on the Fuji release. There's some other things that we want to do like Demand Management and PMO they're coming out with in Geneva and Helsinki. It's one of the reasons we're here at the conference is to see if it will be scalable to those processes as well. From what I've seen thus far, it's pretty scalable.

To be honest, we have mostly in-house support. Anytime I've had a call or a question, it's been answered usually within a few days. Most of what we're looking for is just how do we get the right data. Our guys are able to go back to the system analysts, and get that information out, and then tell me which field to put in the report. It's a fairly quick turnaround.

We were using a competitor product at the time. It was from our corporate office. We brought a real sharp guy in from NetApp. He had used the ServiceNow platform for about half a decade. He's been to just about every conference. He was bragging about the fact that he was at the Knowledge 2011. He's a pretty sharp guy. He brought it to our attention, and then helped implement it. We tease him and say that maybe he's brought a lot of his bad habits from the other companies into this one too. Along with some of our bad habits from CA, which is us poking fun at the customization. He really does know the product inside and out, and we're lucky to have him.

To be honest, I wasn't involved a whole lot with the initial setup. At that point, I was in the PMO. I was watching it get executed as a project. It was a fairly quick project. I think we implemented six or seven of the modules that are out there reporting incident management etc. We were up and running in about two to three months.

Now that said, there's always the PMO side of the house where I got to look at it and go, "Did we get all the requirements?" I think we did it more agile. We're still finding things that we'd like to do different. Things we'd like to change now that it's up and running. Getting it up and out of the box is really quick. We did some customization which was really quick too.

Go ahead and get it. You'll have a cleaner insight into your organization, and how it's really working. You're going to do a little fighting with your groups if they're not already doing careful time tracking. ServiceNow is based at the task level. They assume that they are going to give you a task. That task has some time collateral associated with it. That tells you how long you're spending on certain things.

You have better insight into those tasks, better insight into how that time is being deployed. If your organization isn't already doing that, you're going to have a little bit of a culture shift. If that's where you want to go, if you want to transfer your business from "Trust us, we'll just get it done," to "I can actually demonstrate how we're doing it." ServiceNow is the right product for you.

I would say Fuji is about a 7, and what I was playing with the other day in the labs is probably about an 8 or a 9. It's a great product. I like where they're road mapping it. They have a very clear plan, and where they're going next. That's pretty exciting. We'll keep the product in-house for a couple of years.

We use it as a tool to develop and monitor attestations and assessments where we develop questions based on our policies and ask application owners to explain and show compliance with our policies through a series of attestation questions.

I refer to it often when I'm looking up applications in the CMDB. The CMDB gives me a lot of information on the application in terms of what certain parameters are, who owns the application, and what's the structure of the organization owning the application. It gives me a fair amount of information.

We are using the latest version. We stay up to date with all the patches.

It helps with how well our applications are compliant with our policies, and that helps with the overall security of our applications. We are very detailed with our policies, and there is a buy-in for security across the company. So, we're able to show which applications are in compliance with the policies and which aren't, and we're able to target those that aren't for a little extra work and attention.

The thing that I like most about it is the easy integration with the CMDB. I'm able to look at the CMDB for applications and develop my assessments and attestations based on the application and point them at that application owner. So, I can really automate the whole thing.

Its setup is tough. It takes a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience.

In terms of features, we're pretty happy with the product as it is. They make regular improvements. We look at them, evaluate them, but we haven't seen anything that we wanted to use it for, though we continuously reevaluate our tools to see where we can expand our capabilities.

I have been using this solution for three years.

We find the product to be very stable. Because it is a cloud-based application, you have your issues with networks and all, but I don't consider that a part of the problem with the application. I find the application to be extremely stable.

It is fairly easy to scale. When you start adding a lot of different modules to it, it becomes a bit more complex, but if you have well-trained staff who can manage it in production, it becomes relatively simple, especially once you develop processes to handle that.

In terms of usage, just about everybody in the company uses it. If you're in technology or you're using technology, you use the interface with this application one way or the other. This is the company's ITIL tool. This is how we handle requests and manage the integrity of our systems and applications. I think it's going to be here for a while. How long? I can't tell.

Tech support is very knowledgeable. We've used them, and they've been very helpful. If someone is starting with ServiceNow, I would recommend them to spend a fair amount of time with their tech support. However, they do tend to point you towards some of their vendors who provide consulting services, and as with most consulting services, it can be all over the place.

We were using another solution. It was the standard for service management for so many years, but it was horrible. I don't remember the name.

The setup is tough. It takes a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience. So, you have to basically work with the product on an almost exclusive basis to become very knowledgeable. However, it is very powerful, especially once you have people who can write JavaScript and who can improve and make the product do a lot more than it does coming out of the box.

We have operations staff that handles the ongoing maintenance. It's not anything where we're having to pull down servers or anything. It's just managing access and maintaining the integrity of the CMDB. Everything else is just types of ITIL efforts such as handling tickets, processing requests. That's it. I find it very useful.

I cannot speak for the company in terms of what the company sees. All I can say is that from what I've used it for, it has been extremely valuable because I don't have to go around with spreadsheets to people. So to me, it is a return on efficiency.

For the modules we use, we found it competitive. I can't think of any costs in addition to the licensing fees.

My advice would be to look at it very carefully. It is a great product, but make sure that it fits your company culture and the way you want to do things because it is a big product.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

We use the solution for workflow automation and business processing.

It has been effectively used in our organization. We have large chats with 150,000 people and everyone has found it to be useful. Our internal IT team is supporting the tool and trying to get everyone on-board.

We have found the service easy to use, although, we have ended up customising a lot of parameters. It is a functional comprehensive featured solution compared to everything else on the market.

The customization that we are doing for the needs of our organization are difficult to do and could be improved. In the a future release, if they have not done so already, they should include cognitive capabilities features which we are currently lacking. 

I have been using the solution for three years.

We have had no major issues with stability.

We have been in contact with customer service and we have no complaints.

The price of the solution is comparable to industry standards. For the features that we received, it is reasonable.

I have been reviewing a solution called BMC helix potentially coming on board soon. The cognitive capabilities that are being released in the market are pretty good. 

I would recommend this solution. However, we did not have an easy time customizing the tool to do what we wanted it to. I would suggest if it meets 80% of your needs I would adopt the tool, but if not, I think building a custom tool itself would be the way to go at that point.

I did not give the solution a nine because that is too good. I do not think they are at that level. They are the industry leaders, for the automation of workflows. But there is definitely more that could be done. 

I did not rate the solution a ten because nothing is perfect.

I rate ServiceNow an eight out of ten.

We use it as a service desk solution, for ticketing.

First of all, we had several tasks that were performed manually by the service desk and infrastructure teams, but now we have been able to automate those processes and reduce the manual intervention. For example, when an employee from one of those teams goes on vacation, we can block the account and, when he comes back, we can unblock access and reset the password, and everything is done automatically.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility of development for customization.

For example, we are starting now to expand the tool for HR and some other departments. They need applications or processes to improve their tasks. For instance, right now we are discussing, with the Internal Risk team, creation of an application inside ServiceNow so they can open a ticket and follow all the steps according to their process. One of the nice things about ServiceNow is that, if you have your process, you can design the ticket and the form according to your process. That is very useful and can be done quickly.

There's one that I would like to see improved to reduce the cost of our ServiceNow, related to the resetting and unblocking of passwords for users who forget their passwords. We had a conversation about this with ServiceNow. We don't have a huge amount of password reset requests, but the minimum package of resets that ServiceNow offers is much more than we need. In conversations with other companies that have a similar profile to ours, they complained about the same thing: "Why should I have to buy a minimum number of password resets, when that amount is much more than I need?" They should have some kind of scaling of the reset package, like zero to 100, 101 to 300, etc. That would be a little bit more useful for us. That package is very expensive. It's more expensive than if I were to have someone in-house who was dedicated to doing those tasks.

It's a very stable product, it has a very good SLA and RTO. So far, so good, and I expect it will continue like that.

I haven't had any issues with scalability so far, but we're a medium-small company with about 300 users. The most active users are the service desk, infra, and development teams. Overall, we have 50 or 60 heavy users.

Here in Brazil, we have local support from a company called Fast Lane. They are the enterprise that did the development and implementation of the solution in our company. We don't have any issues with them. They are very fast and very helpful. They help us with the design of our processes and the tools.

We had a simple tool with which you would just open a ticket, without SLA, no features. But we had internal issues and realized we should improve our processes. That's why we went to ServiceNow.

The initial setup wasn't so easy, but it wasn't a ServiceNow issue, it was an internal issue. Because it was new for the organization, setting up a cloud solution, we needed to open some ports in the firewall.

One detail we didn't explore so much during the negotiations with ServiceNow was related to Edge Encryption. That is a feature that encrypts all the information that is saved in ServiceNow. It was requested by information security here in our company. We bought it, but the setup for that tool was new here, in Brazil, from what I understood from the vendor. It's a little complicated to have all of the information and all the details set up for it. It took a little bit longer than we expected, but it was a management situation. There was no impact to the business.

We know that ServiceNow is not cheap, it's more expensive than other solutions. But we are trying to increase our ability to handle tickets so that the cost per ticket is less. ServiceNow is a little bit expensive for us, here in Brazil, due to taxes, etc.

We talked with HPE and IBM, but both are on-prem solutions, whereas ServiceNow is a cloud solution. That fact was very important for us, that it is not an on-prem solution, as it reduces our internal cost of support. 

Also, the development time for each process is much shorter than with an on-prem solution. For example, with on-prem, I would have internal processes like change management, open a ticket, fill out all the information, and get the request approved. After that, it would need to be implemented. That would take a long time.

It is very good having this tool. Getting it going went much faster than I expected. We did the setup and had it in production in six months.

The biggest problem for me was our internal process and not Service Now. For example, convincing people to go to a cloud solution, and getting engagement with the solution from information security, were challenges. If you don't have engagement from information security, the project is going to take longer than you expect. The big change for the company, with this solution, is that you're not going to host your data internally, on-prem. You are going to put all your data in a cloud solution. When we spoke about the solution here, within our company, some people said, "Wow! Are you crazy? You are going to put customer information in a cloud that you don't know?" So there are a lot of questions. ServiceNow has all the answers, but if you don't have engagement from information security, it will take you longer.

We have a lot of things we can improve internally, regarding information security, but because we are just starting out, we need our process to mature. I believe ServiceNow can help that a lot. All the features can support us in the future if we expand the tool. We have new models to improve on the automation of our processes in our data center.

My only concern is that when we started to talk with ServiceNow, we received very good attention from them but, after we signed the contract, I didn't know who, in ServiceNow, was taking care of my account. The person sent me an email but he had never been here to ask, "What do you need? How is it going? How is your project?" We didn't get any attention from ServiceNow. We had very good negotiations in the beginning, they were very attentive. But after we signed the contract, they changed my account manager and, today, I really don't know who that guy is.

I would very much like to have him here to discuss the roadmap of the solution or to see what else I can buy. I would like to negotiate some issues that we have, like password resets. I would talk with ServiceNow but, if they are not going to be close to me, I'm not going to spend time running after them to talk with them. I talk with the suppliers and they are helping me, instead of ServiceNow.

I rate ServiceNow at eight out of ten. Why eight and not ten? The relationship with ServiceNow is important for me. I would like to have more engagement from them, to have them here, at my company, so we can talk more strategically. But compared to the other vendors, it gets an eight because it's a cloud solution and I don't have any issues with technical parts or its performance. The tool is very reliable.

ServiceNow's out-of-box process configurations and service-based CMDB data model have revolutionized IT Service Management transformations. Leveraging out-of-box configurations and using frequent small-scope improvement releases (DevOps) has proven to be an effective approach for ensuring timely, lasting improvements to the core service management process.

The traditional ITIL "gather all process requirements 1st" approach to tool design never worked well. In fact, organizations attempting this "Define all Process Requirements" approach would frequently customize the tool to be similar to the process/tool that they were replacing rather than adopting the proven ITSM best practices embedded in ServiceNow. This approach extends the time to value by limiting the focus on ensuring the critical process integration points that drive rapid quantifiable process improvements.

With the right expert guidance facilitating the effectiveness of a strong executive sponsor to ensure the successful adoption of a true service-based culture, a SeviceNow implementation can drive quantifiable process improvements in three to six months in core processes, such as Incident, Problem, Change, Release, Knowledge, Asset and CFG management.

With these core processes integrated and effectively automated, an IT organization is able to transform infrastructure monitoring activities into a true service-based and proactive Event Management capability. This in-turn drives rapid and sustained improvements to service Availability, Capacity, and Demand management processes. Quantifiable service levels may then be negotiated and aligned to meet actual business process requirements.

Bottom line: ServiceNow has shattered the "Five years to a successful Service Management transformation" limitation. With the prerequisite guidance and sponsorship, measurable, and sustainable service level improvements, cost efficiencies can be achieved in 12 months or less!

Note:

1. The importance of acquiring qualified an ITSM expert and their guidance can not be overemphasized. This is preferably to someone outside the current organizational culture.
2. The need for a skilled and charismatic executive sponsor is a proven success-critical requirement for rapid sustained improvements. The right leader will recognize the need for a compelling vision and formal sponsorship strategy for the entire IT leadership team, which they will be accountable for, will ensure the culture change from the traditional siloed infrastructure, and component management focused and heroic effort based culture to a true customer focused and service based culture.

A three phase IT Service Management transformation project resulted in achieving a first year target of less than 4% sustained monthly improvements in true customer experienced availability (based on Incident MTTR metrics) for three key IT Services (three business process automation solutions with formal SLAs). Results obtained were within six months of the project start date.

• Phase 1: Formal process 'maturity' assessments and detailed recommendations. Service Mgmt. Org. restructure with dedicated Process Owners and Service Mgrs. aligned with newly defined IT services (business process related Services). Vision and Sponsorship workshops for IT leadership team resulting in formal Sponsorship Strategy and communications plan.
• Phase 2: Rapid Process Design/Improvement workshops with process owners for Incident, Problem, Change, Release, CFG (ServiceNow PM), and Knowledge Mgmt. designing "to-be" process documents, and integrated, coordinated three month implementation plans. Tool design and implementation plan documented.
• Phase 3: After three month implementation of Phase 2 processes, Rapid Process Design workshops started for Availability, Service Level, Capacity, Demand, and Event management processes. Process documents with detailed process integrations and tool/CMDB requirements spanning all 11 processes. Formal implementation plan deliverables. Coordinated implementation projects initiated.

Primary areas of inefficiencies and delays were related to change resistance and lack of support from the IT Team Lead and IT Manager level staff for involvement in ServiceNow design and training workshops, and lack of support for governing new process policies.

Bottom line issue: Not agreeing in strategy workshops for the recommendation to base performance measures for all IT staff and bonus potential for IT leadership staff on the key process maturity improvement metric targets.

This basic three phase, rapid process design workshop methodology, using an out-of-the-box solution, then the weekly ServiceNow release schedule approach to evolve process designs, has proven successful in meeting target maturity improvement metrics in all cases

Deployment issues were very rare in all projects that had a dedicated ServiceNow Development lead (with a team of Dev and DB skilled staff assigned to the project) involved as a team member with the combined process owners in Rapid Process Design workshops. These workshops involve more than five process owners designing each other's new processes, based on ServiceNow out-of-the-box requirements, guided by the Dev lead and the ITSM expert facilitator (a seasoned facilitator with ITIL Expert certification and ServiceNow bootcamp credentials is recommended).

This approach ensures all process owners and the tool design expert understand the complex integration points between all processes; a key to CMDB relationship requirements insight.

As the tool is SaaS and customization is minimized in the critical early design phase by the Process Workshop's "out-of-the-box" approach, stability and scalability are optimized.

It is excellent, always. This tool and the ServiceNow organization is a class act.

It is excellent, in all cases.

Have experience with BMac software, HPE, IBM and other leading ITSM tools.

ServiceNow has nailed the basic ITIL process integration requirements and the CMDB model is service-based out-of-the-box.

This approach using out-of-the-box and frequent small revisions only works with ServiceNow's quality underpinning best practice framework.

Expert vendor facilitator.

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.

There's pretty much nothing that I have found yet that I couldn't accomplish within ServiceNow if I wanted to. I think for us, we tried several times to implement a CMDB, a configuration management database, and it failed for various reasons. With ServiceNow, we were able to finally do that. My boss refers to that as the pink unicorn, the mythical creature that did not exist.

We finally made that happen with ServiceNow. I feel that CMDB is actually my license plate.

I think historically we have had a real warrior spirit. We would get in there and do it and sometimes that meant we would write something in house. I think that we would invest a whole lot of time on something, and we would get real attached to it. Then the next thing you knew, you blinked your eyes, and we were behind the times. I think that we've made a giant leap or two in the last year, year and a half or so, that we've been using ServiceNow, that I've been involved with.

Now we have invested the time in the CMDB. We've invested the time in a portal and catalog items and now we're moving towards automation and things. We moved from Eureka to Geneva and now we've got this whole fresh look and all these new features. We're able to stay a lot more current a lot faster because ServiceNow is doing the work to keep the platform updated, whereas we can just continue to provide value that is specific to us and what we're trying to do.

There's some platform code that is compiled and its Java code on the server side. There's no documented API on what the functions and properties are of that code, and we're not able to reflect that code to get it to make our own API. I think some of the platform devs have met with me in the developer hub and said that they are working to provide that because they can see why we'd want it. I'm excited to hear that that gap will get closed soon.

Also, some of the way that the patches would break the catalog and the catalog items would cause unnecessary changes to the lay out in the UI. Like moving a field label from the left to underneath. If you have 30 items on a page, or more, that's going to offset everything. Unnecessary moves and then unnecessary moves back, stuff like that.

It's pretty solid. I think that on our dashboard it says 99.8% availability. Now a lot of my customers in the service desk that do our support line, over the phone or through chat, they're telling me that the CMDB look up for config items on the incoming incidents that they're starting, is way faster in Geneva. They've set it, set it, and reset it. It wasn't just a first impression. It's a lasting, "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you." They sent a special email. We don't normally have people that are raving fans of anything you provide tool wise. We have our customers who are usually raving fans on our airlines. This was kind of surprising to hear.

We add users constantly. We on-board 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.

We didn't successfully implement a CMDB. I think different work groups were very siloed and they had the problem of, "Where's our stuff?" They each solved that problem on their own because there was no centralized management database. Some people used spreadsheets. Some people used Wiki Documents or Wiki Documents with spreadsheets in them. Other people just had it in their heads and like, "We'll go ask Jim or go ask Bob. Oh, Bob left. I'm sorry. Go ask Tim. Maybe Bob told Tim before he left." It was like that. What we were able to do was use this as the first product that actually worked. We did try a few other products but we weren't able to get that off the ground. I don't know if that really speaks to those products or if it was the lack of support that we had from our leadership to get it done. I wasn't involved so I don't remember who it was, but I don't believe they were home-grown.

We used a tiered approach. We did like five or six release cycles to get to where we are. We started with CMDB and change management at the same time and I think that that really worked well. When we were working in Remedy, our CMDB only kind of had Oracle database names and host names. Windows or Linux host names and that's it. It was pretty flat and people were used to it and it wasn't a whole lot of information to ask people to put in their change request. When we came over, we were able to stand up change and people were satisfied with just having the host names, which was fairly simple. Then we were able to do kind of a crawl, walk, run, run with scissors sort of thing. I think that it went well.

Come to a user group meeting and we'd love to connect, meet and show you what we've done and talk about where you're at and give you some feedback and advice about what worked, what didn't work, what we thought might work better.

The solution is being used for our ticketing system.

It is user-friendly and simple to use. 

The solution could be made cheaper. Machine learning and artificial intelligence should be introduced in the next release. 

I have been using ServiceNow for two years. 

The scalability of the solution is good. Presently, ten thousand users are using the solution. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

The initial setup is easy. The deployment was done within a month. 

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.