ServiceNow Reviews

One of the benefits of the platform itself is that it's not covering IT service management only. It, for example, has price service management functionality. 

There are lots of modules around IT service management such as IT business management and human resource management (HRC). Bigger clients, enterprises, are often looking for end-to-end business flow automation. Part of those processes, in other cases, are standalone solutions. The ability to implement end-to-end flows, including business ones, is the most important aspect of the solution.

I sometimes try to compare ServiceNow with Micro Focus. When I worked with Micro Focus or HPE, I liked how they communicate with partners, how they provide materials. ServiceNow really does lots of things in this area, however, there is definitely some space for improvement there. For instance, some workshop materials, et cetera, are lacking. They need to be providing vendors and implementation partners with materials and guidance on implementation.

The solution is mostly on the cloud. On-premises implementations are more difficult. 

I've been using ServiceNow for the last five years. I remember my first implementation project was in 2017. Probably before that, I started using ServiceNow and did the training, et cetera.

The stability is pretty good. On average, I don't see many clients complaining about the performance side of stability or availability on the platform.

We did some cases to improve server functionality with scaling. We created clusters. In terms of the scalability of ServiceNow itself, several instances of ServiceNow with synchronization, et cetera, as well as performance, I don't recall scaling so much. In most cases, it's not really required as one instance of ServiceNow is good enough for most clients. They also handle all this backup, monitoring, and et cetera, internally. 

I rarely deal with technical support, as, most often at least, I focus our innovation on implementation projects. Support is more active when it's implemented already and rolled out to production. Other personnel from my department handle that, for sure. From my understanding, in terms of the quality of the support,  it's quite typical. Sometimes it could be better and faster. However, if we can imagine the flow of those tickets for the ServiceNow support side, I would imagine it's quite big. Therefore, I'd say that it's acceptable and understandable.

I also work with Atlassian's Jira Service Desk. I used to work with Service Manager five years ago.

For ServiceNow, I really like it's a single platform. Everything within the platform is integrated already. There are quite rich integration capabilities with other systems at the client-side. For Micro Focus, you can install it in the cloud or on-premises. ServiceNow doesn't really allow you to install anything on-premises. 

On the Micro Focus side, some of their products were really great, such as Universal CMDB or UCMDB. At some point, it's still better than the current ServiceNow CMDB. Some single individual products from Micro Focus were really great for me. However, in some cases, when you come into a client and try to solve a complex task, you need to map the requirements to particular products. For Micro Focus, sometimes it was problematic as you required many products solving more or less the same purposes. At ServiceNow, each module is quite unique and serving its unique purpose. It's more like LEGOs. 

With Micro Focus, I remember in some cases, their solutions were quite resource-consuming. It's pretty predictable since HPE at the time was both a software and hardware vendor. It was good for them to sell software plus hardware. Sometimes it was how to understand why particular software could consume so many resources. That's not a problem with ServiceNow at all as it's on the cloud mostly.

The initial setup is pretty clear. If we try to compare the implementation of some traditional modules, like incident management, request fulfillment, it's an industry standard. It's very good. ServiceNow, from a functionality and partner support perspective, has lots of materials. However, when it comes to some newer modules, some ITBM applications, et cetera, sometimes when they just release the first version of the module, and it might be a bit different from a functionality perspective. There's a lack of documentation and support. That's quite typical. I feel like Hewlett-Packard pays a bit more attention to that.

We're implementors. We implement the solution for our clients.

ServiceNow is still mostly used as an ITSM platform. And IT service management mostly feeds some kind of internal purposes. It's not a business-related platform. It's supposed to save money, not to help to earn money.

Some clients come in to get some help with the reimplementation of a platform. Others are looking for certain improvements to the existing platform. In some cases, it's a greenfield implementation. For greenfield implementations, especially when it comes to big enterprises, the question behind the scenes is we don't really understand how much we spend on IT. There are likely many unrelated budgets, which are not even visible. The first question is how much you really spend. And if they get an answer to this question, it's already a good achievement. 

Over time, we baseline the spending and we implement new functionality and new processes, new modules. In some cases, it's quite expensive compared to the business itself. By that, I mean, the processes we implement. We may have 20 people doing some job and if you look at their salaries for a couple of years, it's a lot. We come in and implement and automate the process for them, and in those cases, it might be five years of salaried budget saved. However, that's years. You won't see the savings immediately. It will be something witnessed over time.

We're a ServiceNow partner. We help to implement ServiceNow for our clients.

We're working on likely the latest version of the solution. ServiceNow provides upgrades two times a year. Previous versions get obsolete so that you can't actually use them.

I often see that people tend to simplify things and they expect any system, no matter if it's ServiceNow or any other system or platform from the area, that the implementation would solve the entire ATSM matter. However, in fact, with ATSM, it's about products, people, processes, and partners. All the efforts should be covered. No solution is a silver bullet.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. it's a very good solution, however, there's always room for improvement.

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.

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.

It's serving our end-user community, making it simple for them to order products, get service from our incident help desk, and perhaps even helping everyone across the globe because we have to stay connected somehow, and ServiceNow does that for us.

We've just launched the visual task boards in the last year, so we're still learning how to do that effectively. Right now, we're trying to do a comparison of what we do with our internal chat and using the chat inside ServiceNow, so a lot of things that we're still learning, and we're trying to break ground so to speak, so that we can get better.

I think I want to focus in on our assets. We do many things for studios, and internally, we use a lot of hardware, so we want to be able to find and understand where our assets sit. If there's a breakdown in communication, how do we service that? We've recently launched with one of the certified partners. How we do a better job in tracking those assets once it comes on location, and then it gets into the inventory. That's the key piece. It's how do we manage those assets, manage the cost, manage where they are, and make sure people have access to that equipment.

Maybe cost in one sense because when you make that investment from the other side of it, you're looking at the cost, but we've been having that ongoing debate. Empty glass could be your cost, but the full glass or maybe half full, or half empty. If it's half full, that means you're getting great things out of it. If it's half empty, you're so worried about the cost. Where are you going to trim. We're going down the path of, "How do we shape our roadmap so that we understand what that investment is going to do for us?" We're using the Champions Enablement Tool to help us chart that out. We have our own internal tool, and there's a lot of similarities, but I think what we want to do is just channel it the way ServiceNow is intending it to.

We've been on it since Calgary, so we were early adopters. We're currently on Fuji. We will probably move to Geneva probably in the fall.

Recently, we've been working with the support because they've been notifying us that there are certain things that may be slowing down our system. Right away, they've advised us that they have that ability to transition us seamlessly and to help us with our connectivity. There are some complaints internally still that we're trying to wade through, but overall we've been quite happy with it. Connectivity for the most part has been very good.

It's tremendous. Just recently, we rolled out the GRC module. It was specific to one of our security teams. At the moment, it was just to help them with their auditing, how they manage their compliance. Now, the part of the business has gotten wind that this is out there. It was demoed. Now, people are coming to us in that sense.

The Service Catalog continues to grow over a hundred service catalog forms, and people want to get rid of the old email in our office, department envelopes, the email, and the shoulder tapping. Now, we're able to centralize them through the portal. In fact, that's another thing, the portal that we have. We had user issues with the community portal on Eureka.

It was scattered. It was decentralized, so people in their own locations were tracking a certain way or doing things a certain way. Some people had barcoding systems and scanned assets, while other locations were just eyeballing it and logging it onto spreadsheets. We knew there's a problem, and just like the Chief Product Officer is saying, you want to automate where you can, and this is where we want to go.

We went out to go get a certified partner's product and cross-views, and they've helped us really just make it look and feel more friendly than when now you look at Helsinki, it's like right in alignment of where we are today and where we want to continue to go, so those are the other things that we have to weigh out.

I wasn't part of that implementation team. I came in to really get the program together because we had our enterprise architect team implement it. However, I think the guys had fun implementing it because they were looking forward to actually getting it in place, start using it, and start deploying it. 

Upgrades through the years have been pretty tough. We didn't get the sandbox right away, so it made hard on our users where we have to do all the testing and make sure we understand the differences between out of the cloud versus what we did with custom development. That took just a little bit longer in analysis and testing implementation.

First question I would ask is, "What are you waiting for? You've described to me all your problems that you're having. You're decentralized. You're disparate. You have all these things that are hanging out there. You don't have a way to communicate essentially through people. Come on board."

I took the governance class. It was a day and a half, and I sat at a table with people that had the same problems. We had a new implementation in the two months prior. We have someone that's on a competitor's application, and they've already made the decision to come in ServiceNow, but it took the management team to say, "Hey, we need to do this. We got to get better at what we're doing." Really, it's all practical in the sense of filling the need, and it's making it simple not only for the end-user, but if you saw the key note today, the backend where the developers and the systems. It's going to be really helpful for everyone.

It's right from our own internal processes, and matching staffing needs, and meeting the customers' needs, and then also ServiceNow coming in where cost has to be helpful to us. We know the platform is there.

I would say the ability to create applications that follow a standard workflow as well as record producers. We handle a lot of requests from our entire university. The biggest thing is giving our users a service catalog with a bunch of simple items, most of them are record producers, some of them need a workflow, just allowing them to go in and very simply submit request. For us that's probably the most valuable feature.

They've gotten to a pretty good place with where they are right now. I think a lot of it is going to be that citizen developer, making things a little bit easier to interface with. I really like the new rest messaging they put in there that allows for much easier integrations. I like most of the new application stuff and the IDE. I'd say from here, just smoothing out that whole IDE development process, making it easier to make changes to global in the IDE if that's where they really want us. Some improvements are probably needed there but I don't have anything massive on my list that ServiceNow needs to do.

I've personally used it for about four years.

I had no issues. When there is potential for a downtime, they always email me and let me know. Even when I get those emails, I've experienced mild hiccups but beyond that, I've never been locked out for more than maybe 30 seconds in 4 years.

When we started, we had about 35-40 IT folks inside of ServiceNow, plus probably about a thousand end-users logging in for self-service. Now we've probably about quadrupled that at this point and run into very little snags. I would say the biggest thing with scalability for us from a ServiceNow perspective is just make sure your user data matches whatever you're using elsewhere. We use single sign on and we need to make sure that the user data in ServiceNow matches that so that users can actually get in when they're supposed to get in.

It's mostly good. I would say there had been times where it's taking a long time for a resolution. Sometimes that's probably just due to the fact that whatever I'm submitting is not that important. I'll happily admit that.

I've had some issues that have taken four to five months to get fixed. Again, we're not talking the show stoppers. When I needed something, I've had probably two cases in the last few years where it's just been absolutely integral, like I'd get an answer right now. They were pretty good in those situations.

I would tell you that for me and for what our business uses, I highly recommend it, but that you should look at their business case and see if you need a product as fully-featured as ServiceNow is because it comes at a cost. Depending on what your needs are, it's possible to look at other products. There are a lot of similar products out there. ServiceNow is probably not the cheapest but if you have a specific set of needs particularly the ease of building applications, request forms, stuff I mentioned earlier, I think it's the best product on the market.

We initially got on board because it's a single system of record, and we're trying to centralize a lot of different apps. It's enabled us to decommission a number of different systems that we were using such as incident change, problem management, asset management, financial etc. and it's enabled us to pull them all together so now we can develop an entire portal inside of ServiceNow. We just enabled it last month, to bill out catalog items and we have been able to use the financial element to then cross bill all to our lines of business, so it's been huge success for us so far.

There's are a lot of benefits, and it depends on our audience. In the department I work in, Technology Portfolio Business Management, the biggest benefit was the ability to do asset management in a centralized place and to do the financial elements of that together. I also work with the Infrastructure Team and their key element right now was to centralize incident problem and change and build those functions out of the company. We're now expanding it to another audience which is our global Network Operations Center, and for them the biggest benefit is going to be a centralized dashboard of all their event management. Then we have another infrastructure team that would say the biggest benefit is probably the business process mapping element and the ability when there is an incident to be able to drill down and understand exactly where those problems are in the environment.

It's so new to us, everything is shiny and everything works well so it's hard to state that right now. We are pretty much loving everything, especially at Knowledge 16 where we got all kinds of new ideas to expand our footprint in the company. I'd say we don't have a lot of negatives, quite yet. There's a few little limitations that we run into with each of our implementations but they're very minor. Drill down capabilities and reports maybe or I think one of the bigger ones we ran into with our financial management implementation was that there weren't enough layers in the hierarchy to do all the split costing that we were trying to do but we worked through it. We just managed it a different way. Part of it was how we did it beforehand and trying to bring that in versus what ServiceNow says is the best practice, so we're still adapting.

We've been using Geneva in-house for about six months.

It's been beautiful. We spun the thing up as soon as we signed the contract. Right away they asked us what they names were. We had development tests and production instances. I can't speak to how fast it was bit to was pretty quick. We've not had any system interruptions whatsoever. It's been available 24/7.

We had some homegrown tools, and for incident management itself we had a multi tenant instance with a vendor called Compucon. We shared an instance which wasn't going well, so we brought it in house and then decommissioned our internal apps.

It was incredibly easy. We had the vanilla version and then we used a professional services vendor to kind of help us weed through what was there, to help us understand it, do some initial workflow set up, so it was very simple.

Our current challenge, because it's a little bit of a rub right now is we're going through re-negotiations on contract because absolutely you're going through the big sales pitch, it can do everything at a cost. We were given all of it, and we purchased a small amount and now we're saying, "Oh yeah, we want to do that." Well, more fees for that, more fees for that. So it's been a real challenge to understand what that pricing structure looks like.

That's one thing how they bill off of nodes and CI's and stuff for some of the capabilities and then we've had a challenge with. Getting to a steady state with our IT users, understanding what capabilities they can truly have with the matrix that was provided to us, and then given a sufficient amount of time after go-live to really reconcile and get to a steady state before we go through and re-calibrate the contract to include whatever. So that's an active conversation that's happening right now but we're working with some great people so we're confident we'll get through it.

So far the people we've been working with are great. The system is available all the time, and we have high hopes for the single system of record concept where everything is linked together. We love the user experience concept that we're starting to roll out. That's a huge piece for us as our big disconnect from our business slash end users in IT, the way they communicate, throw things over the fence. We see this as a great opportunity to kind of bridge that gap and kind of bring both players together.

One of the reasons we're moving over financial management in addition to system of record is we use VMWare and we're shutting down for very specifically to that container or that tool. I think we're paying VMware three, four, or five times what we're paying with ServiceNow so, we have a huge desire to get off that in short order plus we're already seeing more features in ServiceNow for value add then what we had in VMWare.

For me I believe it would have to be the real time reporting capabilities that it has, as well as the knowledge management features as far as reporting. We're just getting kicked off with trying to push knowledge management out into the organization. It's important to get a read on how it's being accepted as well as what's being used and how we can improve upon it in real-time.

I believe because it has so many different pieces to it and they're all interconnected, they're all interrelated. As you know, in IT everything relies on everything else. That fact alone that the CMDBs in the middle and everything feeds into it and comes out of it. That alone is an essential piece to the strategy.

Look at the cost savings that's there for it, the capability. So many companies nowadays want to make sure that they're on an ITIL compliant platform and ServiceNow is definitely that platform. I'd have to say that's one of the big business drivers. If you merge with another company, you've got an immediate capability to include them and bring them on board.

I think within knowledge management the editor could be greatly improved. To me it's very archaic looking. One of the issues is when you go to pull a document in there - we're talking about knowledge, we're talking about how to do something in many cases. It doesn't do numbered lists very well. As soon as you put a picture in it starts your numbering over. I don't know if there's something wrong with our implementation or it's just out of the box. We have it set up out of the box. That's one of the downsides. In general I hear a lot of people say that the interface from a back end. From the folks that have the IT role, it's not a pretty picture.

Myself here with this organization I've used it for about two years, and with other organizations on and off for about two years plus. Currently, we're on Geneva.

We've had a little bit of slowness at times. We're looking into the heart of that and I think that maybe some of that is maybe our implementation. The way we've gone about setting up database calls and things like that. It's hard to say. I can't really speak to that because I'm not working so much with that group. Occasionally, depending on the implementation I've seen it always run smooth and fast.

Other times we have to deal with the internet is right in the middle because it's cloud based. You never know if that's the reason for the lateness. Overall it's a great product.

Well from what I understand I can't speak to that really well. It seems quite scalable. I know other companies that are much larger than ours that have had an excellent implementation. I was in a talk where the gentleman was from a large company that had a huge investment in it, and they were using it across four hundred and fifty thousand employees or something huge.

In my past lives they have used Remedy as well as HP Service Desk at the time. At a previous company, I helped to implement HP Service Desk.

I don't know how it has been here, but in other places it's been a very straightforward and simple implementation. What it really requires is all the pre-work. If you're going to implement it you want to have an understanding of what you're stakes are. For example, in incident management. What the teams are going to do. What the processes are going to be worked out within the tool. That's an important aspect. A lot of people may think that you implement a tool and you have it. It's not that simple. You have to do a lot of work before you implement to make sure you have your processes in place.

One of the things important, if you're going to put new processes in it, have them written down and have them well understood and well documented before you implement it in the tool. Once you implement in a tool, that's when you can really start to improve on it. If you just go forward and put it in a tool and you don't have any documented process then you're back to square one. You don't know what you're improving and you're making changes and it's not a pretty picture.

We have a young lady who's very adept and she's moving forward with that. Making great things happen.

Make sure you have your processes well defined before you go to implement a tool because that's where you're going to get your real payoff. It's going to really help you improve things if you have all that well documented, well understood before you have it implemented. I think that's the biggest thing.

I think that they could do a lot better on thr interface. Especially for the back end because we can build all kinds of- there's all kinds of companies out there that create all these things. At some point you would think that they want to improve these certain aspects of it that- like knowledge management.

I worked on the CMDB configuration management setup, and then previously I worked on software asset management also and hardware asset management also. I did a little bit on the ITSM side also.

The incident management is great.

We have found change management and CMDB to be very useful. 

The knowledge management is quite good.

The AAR might require further improvements.

There are areas such as technology management that have scope for further improvement. 

Their cloud management is also not that great compared to other products.

There could be some additional capability for discovery. As it matures, it needs to showcase to users what is possible within the solution.  

I have been using it for the last seven years or so, on and off, and especially in the last three, four years, more on a more regular basis. I'm using it almost daily at my job.

The solution is stable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

Sometimes the CMDB, BK table gets slow, however, almost all of the other things are good, at least.

The scalability of the product is very good. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so.

Technical support has mostly been good. We have no complaints in terms of the level of service.

Whether the initial setup is difficult or complex depends on the implementation. We have done multiple implementations, however, it depends on the product's implementation on the consumer end. It can vary from straightforward to complex.

The deployment also is product-specific, customer-specific, et cetera. It depends, for example, on the number of customers, the particular, specific scope, and which product is required, and how many users and devices that they have. All these things come into play and change how long it would take to set everything up.

The size of the team a company might need for deployment and maintenance is product and scope-specific, however, it can vary from one or two people to even maybe five to ten people, depending on which products are in scope, and what is the scope of maintenance requirements.

If the project is for the ITSM, it'll be 18 or 19 managers playing a role, and the rest being the configuration managers with other things. However, it depends on the project.

We're an implementor. We handle the setup for clients. 

I'm a consultant. We are a managed service provider. As part of the implementation, the client usually does look for a cloud for it.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. I deducted a mark as sometimes there is a certain level of slowness, however, for the most part, we have been happy with its capabilities.