ServiceNow Reviews

The flexibility of the platform, being able to modify forms or modify workflow, building applications, utilizing basics that they've given you and being able to expand them to adapt to your own personal environment. Everybody says that "This isn't how ITIL works" or "You shouldn't be doing this." I'm like, "But ITIL is a framework, that's the whole point of it" so that you can ingest what you need within your environment. The product is malleable. You can change it around to do what you need to do. If you need certain configuration items or certain categories or certain subcategories, you can make it work for your environment.

I think the value comes from centralizing processes across business units. I've seen it where we started in IT and then we've brought in teams like library functions or secretarial support, security auditing for cybersecurity needs, making sure that your meeting a new type of governmental regulations, and things of that nature. I think it's not about just utilizing it in one particular business area. It's something that can be used across departments and I think that's what's best about it.

I think that the product has grown considerably over the last few years. Initially, I had some issues with just ease of use. I was on Fuji before I started at my current employer. I came in and they're on Geneva. Between Fuji and Geneva, it's just total rework of just the way that the UI looks. I think it's more appealing to the eye. I think that it is easier to use than it used to be. A lot of the having to code and having to know how to use java and all that kind of stuff just wasn't as easy for us non-coding type of individuals. Now that you have like the little point and click and more non-coding development, it's much better.

I think more progression like on the visual task boards. There are some things that are there that seem a little quirky. If you want to move something to a visual task board and when you go into it, it can't really update it in the fashion that I would like to see. You have to click on the number and then it opens up another form. I think a little easier updating processes to their visual task board.

I think a little bit more ease of when you're using the email flow. If I'm emailing something into the primary email address for ServiceNow that it could parse out particular things from the content of the email instead of just from the to or from or the subject line. That would be something that would be a value add.

Deployment, no. I don't think it's really deployment, I think it's more of individuals just getting used to if they're not used to something like ServiceNow. Getting used to the way that ServiceNow works. The concept of ServiceNow users and just getting to understand "Can you have notifications for this?" or "Do you want notifications for this?" Those types of things. I think it's hard when users are going through change whenever to modify something and then they take that grace period where they can get used to something new.

Not in the newer versions. I would say that years ago before ServiceNow really went through a big development of backend data infrastructures and fault tolerance. Today, I haven't really seen any of those types of things.

It's actually pretty easy. When you have a new IT person that comes in, you put them in the appropriate groups, you should sit them down, you kind of explain your process flow and how to utilize it. I think one of the easiest things with ServiceNow is the fact that when you log in, you're in groups and if you go to incident, my work, there's all of your work right there. Then the reporting function, it just takes it to the next level because you can go in and say, "Well, this might be my work, but how many things have I closed or opened?" or "What do I have pending?" Just different things that you can do with it to understand.

At my previous firm, we used Remedy. My current firm previously used something called HiQ Tracker or something like that.

There were other products that have been used before, but mostly IT wants to go into making sure we're using the best framework, ITIL framework, ITIL processes, making sure that you're using metrics and tracking and understanding where all of your resources are being utilized across your infrastructure so that you can get the best value out of the people that you have on staff.

For me, it was easy. I would say that for some individuals who are not very exposed to ITIL concepts, it can be very hard because they've never been exposed to the whole language, that whole concept, and framework of your problem, incident, and change. Most people, if they've never used ServiceNow before, continue to call incidents, tickets or calls or cases. For some of them to get used to the language, I think that that's where the implementation can get a little hard for individuals and they can get a little frustrated because not everyone is on the same language.

If you're really wanting to understand the time and the effort and the amount of work that flows through your organization, utilizing ServiceNow can help you really build that infrastructure out by tracking incidents and then taking incidents to problems and making sure you have a changed infrastructure, really understand how much downtime you could have with an environment. You can understand how much time the service desk is spending per call, how long your engineers are taking to really resolve a larger issue or deploy an upgrade. From building those processes and then having metrics and KPIs and dashboards, your executive management can really see how much time and effort and if you need more resources within your environment. I was able to show that I needed more staffing just from using reports out of ServiceNow and I was able to show how much of incident climbed within our environment and the gap between two years before and how large we had grown, just an incident processing. Showing how much downtime within our infrastructure had occurred and were we meeting downtime, requirements from our SLAs and organizational requirements.

I think I've been using it for nine years. I think it has changed considerably over the nine years and has gotten much, much better. You can't give something a 10 because there's always room for improvement.

As I'm a developer, what I would say is that it's very flexible. The tool can be fully customized. You can do anything to everything, and so I would say that would be the key feature for me as a developer. I can do whatever the client asks for as everything is possible.

Let's say what happens is the customers want rapid delivery to get their operations. So for that they need something to be implemented, at least a vanilla system very easily. So ServiceNow's out-of-the-box features are so good to start with and then down the line, let's say they use it for three months, then it's very easy to just change things.

First of all, nowadays customers are moving all their native applications into ServiceNow. So it's definitely a kick start for them to start using the out-of-the-box features, and then realizing the potential of this tool, and then start getting their native applications loaded to ServiceNow. And eventually down the line after a few years, all their applications will be in ServiceNow. So now you have a single source of truth.

It's mature, but I would say that there are a couple of models, which I think in ITSM, they are not that mature yet. They're still doing it, and definitely even to customize it, but I am talking the out-of-the-box product. When you say ITSM, some of the processes I would say aren't that mature enough because I also have gone through the ITL training.

In particular I would say the SLA, but they have a new release. They have added a couple of features and that should suffice. That was the gap of the earlier version.

There were issues deploying Fuji, but not after that.

It's a very new system, and we see bugginess. In Helsinki we found that we were using one feature but we kept getting errors. I thought it was something that I did, so I spent three or four hours and I couldn't get my answers. So then I realized I basically re-realized when I spoke to ServiceNow people and they troubleshooted that it was a bug. In terms of performance it's very good.

It's very scalable. I've been working with two major clients and they're pleased with scalability.

The biggest part is the ServiceNow community. It's very active, and you can just type anything in Google, it's very easy. You'll get answers that way.

I have experience with HP Service Management. That's how I started my career. So in terms of the processes, both are good. While HP was also mature, ServiceNow processors have flexibility which is and that's amazing, and it's easy as well.

When a customer starts with ServiceNow, they go with it out-of-the-box, that's very easy. Just a couple of configurations here and there without any customizations. That's very easy in terms of implementation, and even customizations, it's pretty easy. It's smooth, and that's why we as product developers like the product, because it's too flexible. It's very flexible.

You need to look at what tool you're currently using, what gaps you have, and what pain areas could easily be fixed by the flexibility of ServiceNow. Based on that I would say, OK, why go with ServiceNow and not continue with the one that you're using.

The first thing is it's openness, since we're a Remedy shop right now. With Remedy, half of it's probably how we implemented but it's very closed off. It's really difficult to get anything new added to it. 

The big 'features' are the openness and ease of use. It's very intuitive, and it seems very straightforward to the point where, "It's got to be something I'm missing here." It's very simple to do things versus Remedy. I feel like, "Are there features missing here?" It doesn't seem hard enough to use. 

I went through training and everything. I realize that it does as much as Remedy plus much more. Openness and ease of use are the two big things right there.

We have Remedy right now, and currently, we struggle with process, as does everyone, so we're hoping that because ServiceNow is easier to use, easier to build and that we can actually get our processes up and running. I know personally you have to have processes before you buy a tool set. We tend to do it at the same time. The whole business that with this new tool set we can finally get our processes define, implemented, because that's really a struggle.

I don't have enough experience to really say a lot about this. Maybe, the one thing we're looking for especially, after being at Knowledge 16 is best practices. I'm looking at it going, "I'm a developer by training. I could cause so many problems with this system. I could create things in it that I shouldn't. I could use it for things that I shouldn't."

That's the one thing, it's like a Swiss Army Knife. I shouldn't do surgery with it, but I probably could. That'll probably be the biggest thing, is right now since we're new to it. We need to learn how to answer "What shouldn't we do?" It's so flexible to actually build things with, it's what should we do and what shouldn't we do that we need to determine.

We've got Remedy completely tailored for us, and now we have to upgrade but can't. So we need to figure out what we can and can't do so we don't run into the same upgrade problems with ServiceNow. We are working with Fruition Partners and they're doing all of our implementation. We're looking to them to help us with some of that.

We haven't used it in production yet so I can't really answer.

We're on Remedy now, and we implemented a previous version of it about 10 years ago. We made tons of changes and customizations to it. When it came time to do the upgrade we couldn't.

We're working with Fruition Partners to implement it.

If you have an existing Remedy installation I'd say, "Run, run away from it. Run to ServiceNow." To me that's a no-brainer. If you have nothing I would ask to get a demo to understand what ServiceNow will do for you. You need to really get into the whole ITLL realm and get some training. The thing would be is to realize what it can do for your company. What we've really done is realized what going in that direction can actually do for our company. Therefore, this is a far superior tool to implement that.

Again, it's a tool, it's not going to help you if you don't have that great understanding of processes. The first step would be is get some kind of a basic demo. Understand ITIL and really look at it and see how can help you guys.

The most valuable features at this point in time for me is the ability for tracking changes, for tying changes in the problem tickets together, tying incidents together to the problem tickets. The interaction between our user to IT aspect, from top to bottom, has been fantastic. Whereas users submits a problem because they have a problem, then we've got to find out if it's a bigger problem, or if it's bug, or SDLC, all this stuff. For me in my role at this point in time, which is changing, it's just tracking everything from bottom to top. We're making sure that stuff is getting done and then communicating back to teams, and it's a full loop.

ServiceNow was implemented over seven years ago. When I came on it was already implemented and I didn't have much of a role in getting ServiceNow changed, add-ins, whatever. They weren't reaching out to other companies. I was basically brought in to do monitoring buildouts, and get our very baseline infrastructure more organized.

I actually don't know. To be perfectly honest, I feel that just about any tool, as long as they have the same offerings, can be modified to fit the company that is attempting to use it. Take a look at an ERP solution. ERP has been around for a lot longer, to a certain degree than say ServiceNow and there is a massive amount of offerings. You can go with SAP. You can go with Oracle. I can't even remember the other guys' names. No matter what, you can always make them work for your company.

They may not have been the best choice for you, maybe there are pluses and minuses. Once you actually get into the application, you start figuring it out at that point it's like, "Well, it would have been better if we went with this, if we focus more on this." The thing is once you get an offering, you still have the ability to go in and configure it to your heart's desire. ServiceNow, it's the full suite of offerings. You have a lot more to sit in and actually go in and configure, as opposed to it's just another ITIL based application that I can sit in and configure.

I know there are places that they can do better at. While I'm not an administrator, I'm not sitting there configuring it, I know our person who does configure it does have his foibles. There are certain things that are difficult to get out of ServiceNow, which is why I suggested going to partner companies that are using ServiceNow already in your similar environment. You go to ServiceNow and say, "Hey. This is what we want to do. How can we accomplish this?" ServiceNow says, "You can do it any way you want."

It's like, "That's not an answer." It's like, "What should we do? We need guidance." Well, "No. you can do anything with it." Okay. That doesn't quite help me as a user, and future administrator, or as an executive. I'm sure it sounds great for an executive, but when it comes down to it, when it starts growing in your own environment, executives starts asking questions, "Why hasn't it been doing this?" It's like, "We don't know how to get that matured within our own environment." It really comes down to I think they can improve upon. They are doing that here with the networking, but for as themselves, have their own best practices to a certain degree.

To a degree, yes it's stable, but mostly it's due to data center issues on their side, or it's come down to network issues on our side. Since it's external, it's not internal, you're looking at having to deal with Internet weather, or data center hosted environments, or our instance had the issues, which is pretty rare.

It's been a long time. It's been a very long time. I think mostly they had a roll back of, not a build or an update. It was some type of data change, but I don't recall the details as it was several years ago.

I wouldn't know because I don't actually handle any of that aspect. Again, I'm still pretty new to actually having my hand in helping with ServiceNow. I don't have any of the hands-on experience. I'm more of a user at this point than an administrator of certain degrees.

I've used many other types of applications such as HEAT, or Remedy, any of those guys and a couple others that I can't remember the name of. They're all customizable to a point. Obviously, not many of those previous ones actually had a full ITIL buildout, or full offering as ServiceNow does. From my point of view and my aspect, I'm more concerned about user experience, and more concerned about backend experience as an IT professional coming in and trying to fix issues, and track said issues. ServiceNow has a much bigger offering in the sense that you've got new changes. You've got your problem ticket findings. You've got tracking for CIs, and the CMDB database, and sitting on the backend trying to provide all that data for those tickets, and whatnot, throughout the company. It makes it a lot easier. It's definitely a one-stop shop for being able to actually come in and help your users, but also help your full infrastructure, your backend.

From what I've heard, and all I can go off of is hearsay, it was pretty easy comparatively. I don't know what they were using before for any ticket tracking system, but that's initially what they jumped into was ticket tracking. We needed something to be able to support our IT infrastructure and our service desk. They also wanted to be able to track changes, and do that. It was just like, "Okay, we'll start with this, and start growing more and more." It turned into quite a bit more. We have definitely stepped up using a lot more of the offerings that ServiceNow has, mostly because we have to, to some degree, to be able to make things a lot more efficient. It's worked for us from what I can tell.

You want to sit there and plan. You probably don't want to turn everything on right from the get go either, because then you're just going to overload yourself. The same goes with any type of a larger offering that has hooks into other aspects of your infrastructure. If you turn everything on, you're just going to get overwhelmed, and not actually have proper resources to be able to handle those. It's always start turning things on, start figuring out what the workflow is, and go from there.

Make sure you flesh out what you're doing. Honestly, I see all the pitfalls are the ones where you'll have a misunderstanding, or make a bad choice in configuration. If you believe that the offering is going to work for you, then you need to make sure you reach out to people who are going through similar situations, or rather it's three years in advance in your same situation. Find another partner company that has already gone through the preliminary, but not too far in the future because then you just look and say, "Wow. They completed so much. How are we ever going to get there?" A year or two, maybe three, and talk with them, figure out what their pitfalls were, a similar type company hopefully.

We use ServiceNow for asset management. I manage the IT contracts that are in ServiceNow with the metadata that we have. I'm the associate director for IT contract assets.

When we can centralize all the contract information, ServiceNow will give us better control over asset management and technical debt.

ServiceNow is not meeting our expectations. The contract module is quite rudimentary. It doesn't support contract line items, which are subdivisions of contracts in VA. The result is that we're not able to track those sorts of assets down to the product level. I'd like to see support for contract line items included in the next release.

I've been using this solution for two years. 

My understanding is that the stability is excellent. 

The initial setup is complex because it's not meeting our needs. We're having to build a scoped app to address the inability to save contract line items and data.

For now, I rate this solution five out of 10. 

Some of the valuable features I have found the solution to have are it can serve many different types of businesses, it has strong platform capabilities, provides application development, built-in predictive intelligence, and performance analytics reports.

I have been using the solution for six years.

The stability of the solution is very good.

We have customers using the solution in medium to enterprise-sized businesses. The solution is not meant for small-sized businesses.

The technical support we have experienced was excellent.

The initial setup is really easy. Having a complex environment could add to the installation time but typically the solution can be up and fully operational in six to eight weeks' time.

The solution is priced for medium to enterprises sized businesses. However, it is expensive compared to competitors. Small businesses would have a hard to justify the price, it would not be cost-effective for them.

Those wanting to automate all of your internal functional departments under one system platform I would advise before implementing this solution to train and educate your teams on the use of these types of solutions first. This will allow for an easier transition.

I rate ServiceNow an eight out of ten.

We use it for ITSM and ITBM.

The area where we have benefited a lot is that, initially, it was very difficult to have end-to-end visibility into what was happening. We didn't have any kind of top-down or bottom-up approach to CMDB and ITSM processes across it. We were able to establish that with ServiceNow. Our other ITSM models are pretty dependent on CMDB elements, so that gives an overall picture of what is happening and where it is happening.

• Request module
• Orchestration
• The PPM Module is pretty important in our organization

The workflow is something we use on a day-to-day basis. It's pretty handy the way it is in ServiceNow. 

As our ServiceNow implementation focuses on Healthcare domain which is highly regulated , Hence we are unable to follow the full agile way to develop/implement application enhancement or new requirements , Hence we follow a hybrid delivery model where  we have integrated following servicenow modules Demand-Requirement-agile Developement- Test Management -Defect Management- Change Managementto bring our releases/changes in a regular basis , enables us to practice CIP & also helps us in having an end to end tracebility.

Also, in the Service Portal, use of Angular JS gives a very good look & feel & a lot can be done with OOB widgets - By modifying existing widget which is pretty simple, We can leverage a lot on top of it. 

Finally, I also like the architecture for collaborating between business logic and client interaction on our client interfaces.

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. That is one area for improvement.

Apart from that, initially, we struggled with financial forecasting and financial management in the PPM module. That needs improvement along with the IntegrationHub which came out in a recent release. It's still in its initial stages. That could grow into a more solid solution that could be more helpful.

It's pretty much a stable product.

It has good scalability.

There is a version upgrade every year, which ServiceNnow pushes, so it remains pretty scalable if you remain pretty close to out-of-the-box. It becomes less scalable if you go in a direction where you want to use ServiceNow as the platform and build your own solution with complex logic behind it. Then, that's an issue.

I would rate the support they provide us, at above three out of five. If they do not come up with a solution or our request is out of the scope of their support, they do help us with a direction for how to get it done.

To start with, we wanted a global planning platform for all our ITSM activity, throughout the business, for internal IT. That's the reason we started migrating ITSM from different groups to ServiceNow. We did some homework on that, such as what was the market position of ServiceNow and how we could integrate with other third-party applications. After doing that analysis we came up with the ServiceNow as our option.

The setup, on a technical basis, was not that difficult. But if I want to involve different businesses into using change management, it becomes a challenge to understand the process and implement it on a platform which is standard for everyone. So it's not really the technical aspect, it's more the procedural aspect.

It took us about eight months to roll out ITSM. But after that, we have had other instances where we use a custom solution, out-of-scope applications for our customer service area, and we were able to implement it within three months.

Initially, the deployment was done by a solution partner and, to be honest, they came up with some functions that activated a lot of things which were not needed. But at that moment, it was very necessary for us to quickly jump into the ITSM module and make it available for everyone.

Later on, we realized that there were many things implemented which were not needed. Many approaches were customized but were not required. For example, Incidents is the table where we are currently doing requests, and that was introduced by the solution partner. But when we involved request-management with Incidents, we somehow missed out on a lot of process automation. There is a powerful workflow with this solution and you can do a lot of process automation, depending on different services. 

We looked at 

• BMC Remedy vs ServiceNow
• Micro Focus Service Manager vs ServiceNow
• JIRA vs ServiceNow
• and Cherwell vs ServiceNow.

You can get the most out of ServiceNow if you align your processes more towards the out-of-the-box solution, and not over-customize it to create a solution.

We have 3,000 users hosted on it but not everyone has write-access to the system. There are users who are end users who get Portal access to manage their tasks. Apart from that, there are a few fulfillers who are using the write-access: the support staff, such as the change manager or change coordinator. And then we have admins.

In terms of extent of use, currently, we have more than one instance of ServiceNow. We have three different instances for three different areas, and they have their own sets of uses.

Maintenance is mostly outsourced to a vendor who provides elemental and entry support. We are keeping more of the architectural and solution-designing work in-house.

I would rate ServiceNow at eight out of ten. It could be a ten if we had a more central way of connecting ServiceNow with different systems. They have taken initiative with the IntegrationHub and I'm really looking forward to that. Also, virtual assistance is something that has started, but we have so many requirements regarding intelligent agents being integrated with it. I'm looking forward to that. If ServiceNow rolled those solutions into it, it would enhance our end-user experience and I could probably rate it a ten.

We are consultants. We use ServiceNow to develop ideas and solutions for our customers.

It has definitely improved operations at the customer end. There are some key metrics which users have wanted and they are able to achieve them through ServiceNow solutions.

The main feature would be ITSM, as ServiceNow initially started with ITSM software. That is something which is important for all our customers. HR Case Management and Customer Service Management are two of the key areas which clients are also using.

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.

The stability is really good. As I mentioned earlier, the HR area has a lot of room for improvement in terms of stability. We are trying to customize a lot of things. But overall, in terms of being a stable solution, that is what comes from ServiceNow.

I would rate scalability very high, compared to competitive tools. It is highly scalable.

If we implement it for large enterprises they could have 10,000-plus end users. We have implemented it for small organizations as well, where they have just 1,000 end users.

Out of ten, I would rate technical support at seven. Sometimes, it seems to me that even though we are looking for a simple solution, if something has to be customized, ServiceNow technical support doesn't look at it and they simply say that we have to go with Professional Services. They won't look at any custom script or any custom implementation. Where we have done a small customization to something out-of-the-box, even in those cases there are times when ServiceNow is not able to support us.

Before ServiceNow, I had worked with BMC Remedy and worked with and compared Micro Focus Service Manager vs ServiceNow. We switched our services because ServiceNow is really easy to configure and it's a cloud tool. In terms of the performance and the implementation, it is really easy to configure.

From an initial setup perspective, it is very simple. That is why ServiceNow is the market trend, compared to Remedy or compared to HPE tools. It has already captured close to 60 or 70 percent of the market. The initial setup is really very user-friendly and very easy to set up in customer environments. Just drag and drop. You really don't need any technical skillset to deploy ServiceNow at customer sites.

Deployment time depends on what a customer is trying to implement, for example, the number of modules. If a customer is going with the basic ITSM module, it does not take more than two to three months to implement that complete ITSM suite.

In terms of implementation strategy, first we try to go with the out-of-the-box features and try to follow ServiceNow guided setups, which are available on the ServiceNow Wiki. A lot of information is there. We can blindly follow that for the initial setup and for the configuration.

The staff required for deployment and maintenance depend on the customer's requirements. If the requirements are really complex and they want a custom solution, then the timelines and the staff increase, based on that. There's no standard staffing, as such, in terms of implementation. It completely depends on the complexity of the requirements and, obviously, the size of the requirements.

Initially, the licensing model ServiceNow came up with was very good. But now, from a licensing perspective, they are changing their model day by day. It is becoming a bit expensive for customers.

The licensing is changing drastically. Especially for the Orchestration piece and the HR piece, the pricing is pretty high. Initially, when ServiceNow started, the licensing was very nominal and that's why customers adopted the tool. But now, in terms of replacing other tools with ServiceNow, they could probably work on the licensing part. Doing so will obviously increase the ServiceNow market and customers will start using it for that.

We directly migrated from Remedy to ServiceNow because of the growing market for ServiceNow vs Remedy. We got quite good feedback from some of our competitors and customers that ServiceNow is really good in terms of its integrations. In 2011 we called ServiceNow to demo the product. They came to our organization and we had the demo and we really liked the tool. Then we switched over to ServiceNow.

The configuration is very simple. I would definitely recommend it from a maintenance perspective and from a scalability perspective. It is a really good tool. You can replace your existing Remedy or HPSM with ServiceNow.

Regarding how extensively the solution is being used, it's no longer just an ITSM product. It's a platform, as such. Customers have started moving all their custom applications - in addition to ITSM, their non-ITSM - to the product. They've started building everything on ServiceNow. Slowly, customers are liking the tool and they are very happy to move everything onto ServiceNow.

I rate ServiceNow at eight out of ten. For the two missing points, as I mentioned, there are some new modules which need a lot of improvement. The HR Service Management is not very straightforward right now, in terms of the security rules. We have to spend a lot of time implementing the HR module. It is not really simple the way it is with the ITSM modules.