ServiceNow Reviews

We are an integrator. We help our clients to implement ServiceNow for their companies.

The most valuable features generally depend on our client's needs, but most often it's some type of basic setup like incident management, request fulfillment, SLAs, problem management, change of management, and knowledge management.

In other cases, it can be something like an ITBM suite. Currently, we are implementing project management and Scaled Agile Framework for one of our customers.

It actually has quite a wide list of modules and processes.

There are Virtual Task Boards in the tool in the latest releases. There are many of them in the Scaled Agile Framework. There is some room there for improvement. It's really quite promising but, at the same time, it could be improved and I believe it will be improved soon.

The solution is quite stable. It's actually a big platform with a lot of plugins and a lot of things being introduced in each version. Sometimes there is not enough information about releases. For example, right now we have an issue understanding what the roadmap is for the Scaled Agile Framework.

It's very scalable. It's good, really good. I have experience working with other IT solutions like HPE/Micro Focus, and ServiceNow, in this regard, is all in the cloud. There are no issues thinking about the physical infrastructure. So it's very good.

Sometimes it limits you. For example, in CIS, they had a lot of issues working with a SaaS, but generally it is good.

I haven't had a chance to check technical support myself, but my colleagues say it could be faster. But in comparison to my previous experience with HPE/Micro Focus, ServiceNow is the same. It's good but it could be better.

When I was first assigned to this position and added to the team, and entered the ServiceNow world, this product and its use for clients were already ongoing. It was not new to the other members of the team. I was the newbie here. I checked out some training materials and I had some previous experience in the ITSM world. I just onboarded and started playing this role. It was pretty simple for me personally.

For the company, I can't comment on the initial setup because ServiceNow was here before me.

For the particular client we're working on, I joined the project last summer and it finished this summer. Before that, it had been ongoing for a year or year-and-a-half. But it was a big implementation, ten or 12 modules implemented.

In terms of the implementation strategy, there is most often a need in the client's company and they ask us to do a preliminary assessment and some onsite discovery. After the discovery, we build a prototype and finish the requirements-gathering. Then comes the implementation part which is mostly done through an Agile approach. After that there is testing on our side and user-acceptance testing on the client's side. Finally, it is released.

Speaking in light of my previous experience with HPE, at that time, around 2012 or so, if ServiceNow was a bit cheaper it would have had a good chance of our company choosing it at that time.

Now, ServiceNow is a leader and its pricing is quite good, quite competitive. If it were cheaper it would probably be better in this market niche.

Sometimes some plugins are not priced reasonably but, generally, the platform itself, its modules, are priced reasonably.

Long ago, when our company itself was choosing a platform, a solution for the company to support, there was a big analysis effort and investigation of what was on the market. Back then we chose HPE. But that was really long ago and it's not relevant to my activities and my experience currently.

My advice would be not to try to implement it by yourself. You could spend a lot of time without any considerable outcome.

We have ten clients right now and some of them have 1,000 users, all together. They have 20 to 50 engineers.

Deployment and maintenance on the client's size and their requirements: how quickly they want the implementation done, and on how many people create tickets, etc. The basic team is five to seven people who implement Service Now. For support of the solution, it's a maximum of three to five people.

I would rate ServiceNow at about nine out of ten. One of the things to be improved is their transparency in working with partners. Being a partner of ServiceNow, sometimes it's not clear how we should check for new updates; for example, this Scaled Agile Framework, etc. Working with HPE was more transparent for me. I had good communication points to address questions, not on the support level but on a higher level, to get answers to questions quite quickly and informatively.

We are a large integrator with more than 20,000 IT engineers. We work with many vendors including HPE, Micro Focus, Oracle, and some dozen other vendors.

For our company, it would be incident management with the ability to track and report on that. Showing trends and then tying that into problem management as well. Also completing the whole circle, so problem management and change management. Having one system of record that everything is all tied together and you can connect the dots all the way around through the lifecycle.

Being at the help desk, we see trends and incidence from which we can create a problem to track a larger issue because it's effecting more than one user or more than one location for our restaurants. From there, we run down root cause of what's actually causing this problem to happen. Then from that the developers will kick off change requests to permanently fix the problem. But if you don't have the incident management to replace or the ability to report and trend, then you never know that problem's happening because we have a really quick fix that we do all the time. So being able to see that trending and get ahead of the problems and get them out of the environment makes everyone's life easier.

From our perspective, it's the ability to customize it and provide the different platforms. A good example is that within our organization we have incident forms that are tailored to IT and we have incident forms that are tailored to other groups, like accounting supply chain. They're using the exact same incident form, but they're customizing the fields that show up based on their groups so that they get the experience and reporting they need out of the product, but we're all using one system of record and one form to do that in so we can report holistically.

The other part of that is from a customer and restaurant facing standpoint, we can build out those seamless pages, create custom portals for the restaurants, because obviously the IT view or the back end users view is not what a customer wants to experience. It lets us create that front end view for a customer to get what they need and still have that logic to the system for it to flow through and everything.

I think some of the areas for improvement are some of the features that get added sometimes and not a lot of help and resources get devoted to them. A good example is inside of my self-service portal, we use heavily utilizing the wizards that will actually walk users through a guided experience, asking questions, giving responses to lead them where they want to go because in the restaurant industry not everyone wants to fill out forms. They just want to be led by the hand. They're hired to run restaurants, not run computers. So, there's very little documentation on how to use them and how to build them. It's kind of one of the features that got put in but never really expounded upon because it's not been used a lot. So, we really taught ourselves how to use them.

The other one would be what I'm looking at now which is coaching loops. Very little documentation. Very little understanding of how it works. Again, learning it on my own because the book explains this is kind of the fields and what they do, but very little as far as actually using it as available. I would say sometimes they're great features, and they're great additions, but if there's not a lot of user adoption, then not a lot of documentation gets written for them.

We've been on ServiceNow for about four and a half, almost five years, and we've just upgraded to Geneva.

I think the only issue we've had is our recent upgrade to Geneva went a little wonky. But I think that was partially our fault. We had gotten a little bit behind on patching Fuji and then jumped to Geneva Patch 5. I think there was items missed. Even though it should have been cumulative, I think we had some items that were missed in there.

The other issue we had is when we deployed ServiceNow, we started with domain separation. Mostly because the consulting company we used said that's the only way to do it. It probably shouldn't have been done, but that's not a reflection of the product as much as the consultants we used at the time.

We used Altiris. Maintaining Altiris servers was getting very expensive. They were hosted locally. We had a very old version of Altiris. We never kept up with the new version, so it never went to the cloud. So very old, very hard to maintain. The admin we had at the time was retiring. But probably the biggest standpoint was how limited Altiris was. You really could not customize it. If you wanted to build reporting, you had to have a sequel admin do it for you because there was no user interface for reporting. It was the system sped out the sequel queries that it was told to do, but you had to write them in sequel. So, it was not very user friendly.

I think in some ways we probably bit off more than we should have chewed, but we needed the product to replace Altiris. We had to fill that gap because of everything it did. From a stability standpoint, it was probably on the verge of collapse. We had to put a product in place to take it's place.

We worked with ServiceNow directly now, but during the implementation, we found a third party to do it for us. We were involved, but we also relied heavily on that third party consultant because Altiris had been the only thing we knew for so long that this was a complete change. It was our huge step forward.

Don't look at ServiceNow as what it can do for whatever department you're in, but try to get some buy in higher up in the organization because the more foundation and different groups you can get into ServiceNow at the beginning, the easier it is for the adoption. It really can become something for the entire organization. Getting that buy in from the beginning helps it grow a little faster.

If you've got 5 different groups that will be in it from the beginning, then some of the choices you're going to make are going to be a little bit different and they're going to be a little more future planned than, "I just need this for me". So, it's probably the biggest advice I can give is try to plan for the future.

I've seen other products. I've seen some of the stuff that they can do. Really haven't seen one that can, at least in my mind, replace our ServiceNow for everything that we've put into it, everything that we've done. It would be a very hard thing to do.

We have several applications of the product, however, the main use case is to generate all the backlogs of the different squads where we assign histories and we can link this to concrete people. 

The histories and the tasks that we draft within the histories are used for creating all the burn charts in agile and to show the velocity of how well it was the last sprint in terms of shipments. This is the key purpose. 

We also use ServiceNow to log IT tickets and to trace them. Those tickets can be created directly as a ServiceNow history on the IT squads. This will go directly to their backlog. It is a quite nice interaction.

It's used to manage the sprint in agile to create all the backlogs and to activate the current sprints, to create the burnout charts of the velocity of the sprints, and also to register any IT-related support ticket requests.

When we join the task board we can have a main view that we use on the daily standups in the agile world. It is very easy to navigate across and to move histories around. 

It's great to do statuses or to review tasks. We can open them and get some details and updates. 

It is quite flexible as a system and is very visual.

It helps to keep the daily standards to 15 minutes.

Probably the backlog organization could be a little bit easier in terms of transversality between different squads. It would be nice if we could, with some specific access rights, move histories from one squad to another, as they generate dependencies or duplicate or flag them. We'd like to create dependency charts between different teams. This is something that Jira, for example, used to do very easily.

It would be ideal if there was some sort of Follow button to help users follow certain concrete task histories. That way, if you are following something, you could bet an immediate update when there is a change of status or a new comment or whatever.

In my current assignment, I've been working with ServiceNow since January. However, in the past, I used it from 2016 until 2019. This is my fourth year using ServiceNow.

The solution is stable. It always works. We haven't had any issues. In this case, no news is good news.

The solution is perfectly scalable. What they give you is the framework. In terms of functionalities, every client can customize it. It'll work well for different companies.

The product is widely used in the institution. Likely 90% of head office employees use it. 

I've never really needed technical support. I've used ServiceNow to request technical support on other applications. I was just handed over the minimum standards to use it, and then I learned by doing. It was quite easy.

With my previous client, I used Jira.

I cannot speak to the initial setup. When I started using the solution, it was already in place. I'm not an implementer of it. I'm an advanced user. Therefore, I can't speak to how simple or difficult the implementation process is.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we are currently using. We're likely using the latest as this is a big systemic bank. I'm pretty sure that they are continuously updated with the latest version.

I'm a user. I'm a consultant and scrum master, however, I use a lot of these tools also for agile management work.

This solution works if you invest a little bit of time in preparation. That said, that's the same for other vendors, like JIRA. You need to have efficient scrum cycles and organize them well. You should have efficient planning sessions and all the backlog should be already prepared, drafted, refined, organized, and prioritized. 

What is very important from inception, regardless of whether we're speaking about Jira or ServiceNow, is to have a very clear upfront plan of how you want to structure it. What is the kind of dependencies or links you want to create between different levels of access, for example?

I would advise users to prepare in advance the full strategy of configuration before they start doing anything. It is very hard to change later. You will create technical depth and will call out what you're not going to use. To roll them back once you've started is hard. It is worth it to take time, in the beginning, to try to forecast as much as possible. 

Overall, I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

I use the solution primarily for IT Financial Management and IT Business Management.

In financial management, this platform has the infrastructure allowing us to expand the way we want to. For example, it gives you many business rules and budget models that you can use to optimize your workflow. It does not put you in a box. Additionally, integrating this solution with other platforms is extremely easy to do.

The asset management application could be improved. They have a lot of the infrastructure built, but it does not come with already made compatibility with some of the most popular vendors, such as Cisco and Microsoft. You have to fix it yourself.

If this solution wants to be a big player in the asset management field, they have to have tools to compete with competitors, such as Tanium, that have integration with Cisco and other vendors.

I have been using this solution for approximately 20 years.

I have not had any issue with the stability.

The scalability is excellent. We have approximately 600 people using this solution in our organization.

The technical support was excellent.

Previously I have used CapStone and Remedy.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The price of this solution is expensive.

I have evaluated Tanium.

For those wanting to implement this solution, I would advise using an expert.

When using this solution you have to expect you will need to continuously optimize it to get the most out of it.

I rate ServiceNow an eight out of ten.

ServiceNow enables us to transform IT as it's a business driver. In my mind, we can shift the way IT works to make it more business aligned, business focused, and business oriented. Having a tool that kind of helps IT think differently about how we deliver services is important to me.

We're rolling out service level management this year and part of that is because we had this foundation of our CMDB. Our business services are in there. Being able to report on things based on how our business service is impacted, it's going to be the first time technology's been able to do that at this company. That's exciting.

Speed of delivery is really at the forefront. Being able to do things faster removes those IT obstacles out of the way for our business users and lets them do what they need to do quicker. We're enabling our business to be more nimble without bogging them down with technology.

I feel like there should be perhaps more unit testing before patches are rolled out because every patch has broken our entire catalog. That's kind of the most time consuming areas to test because of volume. There's so many catalog items. Each one has to get looked at, the workflows, each step has to be done. Every patch has broken our entire catalog, and I'd love for that to go away.

From a user perspective, we noticed a slowdown when we moved from Eureka to Geneva, so I've got a lot business customers that are saying, "Man, your tool got slower." I don't have any stats behind it. It's running all the time.

We add users constantly. We onboard 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.

I think the only thing where there was anything negative was now you have two tools in the interim so people still used Remedy for some of the ITIL processes and now they have ServiceNow for change. Then as we increased our capabilities in ServiceNow, more and more people were happier.

Just really for me, it's all about the business case. What's a success story to tell? What are you able to do now that you couldn't do before? Some of the things that I would showcase are the wild set that we used to be in as far as requests goes and now we have the catalog and we're growing that everyday. Also, having a business portal is a huge selling point. Anything where you can spin up a portal as easily as you can with ServiceNow and make IT approachable for a business user is important. Every time they patch, they break the entire catalog. They need to fix that.

We used ServiceNow for change management, release management, and event management. We were also making use of the solution's CSI. The modules of ServiceNow were all available to you, and you could use them.

I have a problem with the way the solution's price is calculated.

I have been using ServiceNow for 10 to 13 years.

I rate ServiceNow an eight or nine out of ten for stability.

I would recommend ServiceNow for larger organizations. We used to have an organization with over 10,000 users. In our current organization, up to 3,000 users are using ServiceNow.

The solution’s technical support is fine.

We implemented the solution through an in-house team.

For us, ServiceNow was really good for keeping everything under control. Everything was documented, logged, and on point. The setup of creating things was quite straightforward.

The use and misuse of the CMDB is something important. Since CMDB should be the heart of everything you have, transforming the CMDB into a repository of information is good enough. If you don't use the full management tool, you can have problems. In three months, you will have to review the CMBD again, or you will have to update it once again in six months.

It differs from organization to organization. It will be taken care of in organizations that have clear processes in place. It's not about the tool but about the maturity of the organization using it.

We used to have lots of integrations with our systems to create tickets automatically. We also had some security related event management activities. When we requested to change something in ServiceNow, it was done rapidly in a couple of days.

Have some consultants that have worked with ServiceNow before, help you with the process. You should try to implement ITIL in your organization. If ITIL is not understood by the organization, then you cannot have expectations that they will follow the way of working as they should.

The solution's automation is quite straightforward. You just need to know what you want to automate. There are several ways to integrate stuff and several ways to have some triggers.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

We use the solution to manage a suite of applications.

The solution has an efficient code engine. It helps implement the workflows very well.

The solution's stability and pricing need improvement.

We have been using the solution for eight years.

It is a stable solution, and I rate its stability a seven. Although, the troubleshooting functions are complicated to use.

It is a scalable solution. I rate its scalability as an eight out of ten. 

The solution's initial setup process is easy. The time taken depends on the volume of code.

The solution is expensive. I rate its pricing a seven.

It is a good tool; I rate it a nine out of ten. I advise others to ensure that it fits their business use cases.

I previously used the on-premise version of ServiceNow. It was a better fit for companies and banks because of their tech security protocols. But for my work with my current company, I am considering the cloud solution because we already have all the other software components in AWS.

The main features of ServiceNow that I use are incident approval management and the ability to link all the information we receive from the finance bureau service. We needed to track the different processes within the IT area and incident documentation. Then we gathered all the information and built a knowledge base. That's the central core functionality that I've been using, and I've seen immense benefits.

We are elaborating and defining the business processes, so I will believe that we will be able to avoid the older models for the second phase. But first, I wanted to have these incident and asset management models in place as a first phase of the implementation.

I've been using ServiceNow for work I've done with various clients for around eight years. I first used it with Wal-Mart International, and then we used it for one event with Brolin Management. I recently worked with Santander Bank, where we used ServiceNow for all the incident and assets management. Now, I help implement different service management tools at my current company, including ServiceNow.

I think ServiceNow is highly stable. These kinds of tools are used in a big company, and I haven't seen any issues in terms of the core platform. However, if we need to customize something, that would be the point to focus on because this would be something new, not a part of the standard flow for the tool.

I think ServiceNow is scalable in the short term. 

The solution has some built-in monitoring capabilities, so we escalate cases as they come. But sometimes the response to our requests is delayed.

Setting up ServiceNow is pretty standard because we want it to manage incidents and use it for other marketing, construction, and procurement areas. But, still, everything would be based on the different services we provide for their operations area. If you move forward with the cloud, I think the number of internal staff needed would be minor. It probably takes around two people to deploy and manage. In this case, we use some external consultants for all the development and maintenance.

For us, it's better to pay the licenses monthly, and I mean when we move ahead with the cloud deployment. I understand that the service includes hosting and licensing as a service as well as some downgoing costs probably. That will be all on the implementation side. It depends if we need some customization. We will need to consider that part as a consultancy. 

I will rate ServiceNow nine out of 10 because it's a little expensive compared to other tools, but it's a very good product from a technical standpoint.