ServiceNow Pros and Cons

Discovery has reduced, on average, the time to build/deploy devices within our environment by one hour. This may not seem like much but it adds up over time. It also reaps additional time savings with its ability to capture changes through subsequent discoveries over the life of the device.

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

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.

In the Service Portal, the widget concept - and the way we have developed our widget - is pretty simple. We can leverage a lot on top of it.

HR Case Management and Customer Service Management are two of the key areas which clients are using.

There are features included in the new release for intelligent software, like the chatbot. For HR services, the HR agent which is in that chatbot has been fantastic.

It actually has quite a wide list of modules and processes. Currently, we are implementing project management and Scaled Agile Framework for one of our customers.

One feature of ServiceNow that is important is the workflow engine. From my perspective [as a consultant] the power to be able to structure processes, represent workforce management for organizations, and the visibility provided by the reporting are additional top features.

The biggest feature is that it is cloud-based, so it's always updated, it's always current. We don't have to worry about patches, revisions. We're always working with the latest version.

I have found many features that are important and that are easier when compared to Remedy; for example, the Scripted REST APIs and the Flow Designer... The Client scripts are simpler when you compare with Remedy.

I like the reporting aspect of it. It helps us know where we stand regarding the types of issues we're receiving... It also shows us trends. That enables us to possibly predict an issue that might come up in the future as well as what is happening right now. We will like that feature. With it, we can either avoid certain issues or know where we need to focus more regarding the service we provide.

Where it could be improved is Discovery. This may sound odd since I just praised the value of ServiceNow Discovery, but improvements to its automatic detection, the breadth of devices, and the depth of devices covered, as well as keeping up with new technologies, are all essential.

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.

For healthcare, which is a pretty audited environment, there are no concrete solutions for digital signatures, apart from our license with Adobe, so it requires orchestration.

HR Service Management is one module that needs a lot of improvement because it's a pretty new module. It was introduced in the last two years. It's becoming more mature day by day, but there is a lot of scope for improvement in that module.

There are a few things that it needs to improve, like automation of most things out-of-the-box. For example, when it comes to cloud management, we are still going with manual intervention. Instead of that, if we had an out-of-the-box feature available, that would be great.

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.

For me, there's a real opportunity, especially within the IT Service Management suite, to give a much better overall view of the workflow that individuals have across the different applications. At the moment, a lot of information is quite siloed in the different tables in ServiceNow.

Some enhancements to the self-service platform would be helpful. That part is still a little barebone... Also, the mobile app is not bad, but it's limited.

The standard UI is very restricted. It doesn't look as good, compared to Remedy. Building your own UI requires some additional coding...

When it comes to reference fields, there are some limitations where you aren't able to use them, like in relationship queries. In Remedy, when you click a menu, you get options directly, whereas here, if you use a reference field, it points you to a different form. So the UI experience totally changes for the end user.

I would like the reporting aspect to be better, including the graphs. It could have some way for us to easily to export to a csv or spreadsheet so that if a graph cannot be provided by ServiceNow itself, we would be able to use other applications to create them. Also, if there was a feature that enabled us to interact with end users directly from ServiceNow, like an instant-messaging type of feature, that would be great.