ServiceNow Reviews

The most valuable parts of ServiceNow for us is the flexibility that it has, that it's a platform, and that we can develop pretty much anything that we need, not only for IT, but also for HR, our finance department, our register's office, pretty much any organization around campus. ServiceNow provides us with a platform that we can develop the tools that are necessary for just about any function on campus.

It gives us one platform that we can go in and do reporting. Reporting is probably one of the key features, it's getting access to data that we have in ServiceNow and being able to report on that is a key element in how we are analyzing and making decisions. We can quickly pull up reports, graphs, charts, whatever we need to be able to make decisions, where beforehand just to pull the data was a lot harder.

We've developed a number of apps or workflows that literally have taken days or weeks to complete because of the approval process. We've taken that into a workflow where now the approvals are sent via email. A user, or an administrator just needs to simply click on that email, click on approve, send it back. We've seen in some of those cases where, like I said, it's gone from days or weeks to literally hours and minutes. Another scenario is we've taken our employee leave system from a paper base where paper had to be filled out manually, signed, given to a staff assistant to enter into our ERP system to being done on the IT systems.

We've now taken that entire process where an employee fills it out online wherever they may be. They submit it, it routes to their supervisor for an approval. That approval comes back, and then that system is fed into our ERP system. There's no manual process to it, other than entering the leave request, selecting the days, and the number of hours you're taking, and the supervisor approving it. We estimate that university-wide, that's probably saving about 2,000 hours per year just on employees having to enter that data back into our ERP system.

Probably the biggest thing that is frustrating is the changes in their price structure, their price modeling. That's been very frustrating for us. Since we came on four years ago, it's changed quite a bit over time. There's been a lot of uncertainty on what the pricing scheme is going to be. It's worked out well for us, but that uncertainty as the company has grown, not knowing where they're going with it, has been a little frustrating.

The first real latency issue we had was about a month ago. We attributed it to probably some updates that we had run. We backed those off to see if they impacted any of that performance. We were thinking it was something we had done. Come to find out that they had transferred us from their Virginia data site to their San Jose, I believe and they had some issues. Once we recognized that it wasn't on our end, we notified them and they were quick to respond to it. That's the only real latency issue that we've had. It's always a concern. That's something that we're always very aware of is because our users are like, "If ServiceNow continues to grow, what's going to be the impact to performance?"

As we grow as an organization, meaning the number of developers we have in the system, we've had a big concern with how we give access to developers, but don't allow them to hurt the whole environment once they’re in. There again, the changes that they've introduced with Helsinki, and that being able to do more sculpt applications, and narrow the access that admins have is a huge improvement. We keep growing as far as the number of developers we have in the system, but we have major concern over what they can touch, and what they should and shouldn't touch.

Scaling, as far as what we're doing in the system, we haven't have any issue with. Scaling, as far as the number of developers and how to organize that, as far as bringing more and more people into actually develop on it, that's been our concern. The time commitment to get them up and running, speed, get them trained, especially trained in how we do things. The other part is the access that we give them, so the issue is not with the solution itself, it's more organizationally.

We had a multitude of systems. When we talked about a knowledge base, Knowledge Base was a home-grown system that we had outgrown as far as IT and the university. We ran into severe limitations with our Knowledge Base. We had old content out there. ServiceNow allowed us to restructure how we're doing knowledge, and implementing a knowledge base to the entire campus. Incident, we were using Footprints, which was eventually bought out by BMC.

It was sold two or three time in Footprints. We had used Remedy. Remedy proved to be so cumbersome to manage, as far as an incident management tool. We've gone multiple directions. ServiceNow, as far as incident management, allows us to quickly escalate issues to the proper teams. Not only across IT, but we've incorporated it in so we can escalate issues to departmental IT personnel as well, and even outside of IT where necessary.

I'm a big proponent of ServiceNow. While I think it's a great system, it's not a silver bullet. I don't think there is a silver bullet system out there for IT, or for an enterprise. I would say ServiceNow is as close, in the variety of systems that I've come across, it's as close as a system has come to meeting not only an IT need, but an organizational need. That's initially where we started. We started it at with an IT need. I would say in order for it to be successful, you have to have buy-in from the top. If your administration is buying in with it, and can show their level of support for that change, that system, it makes it go a lot easier. We had a mixture of support. Some things went well. Others, we didn't have the support, and so it was an uphill battle.

I guess it would be the way incidents are created in ServiceNow. It makes our job a lot easier on the service desk. Another thing would be something we just got which is CG4 which is where we are able to track our inventory as far as laptops, monitors and anything else that might be issued to our, I guess we call them customers, and that's about it so far that I've experienced.

It's very important for us to know where our items are and if somebody leaves the company, we want to make sure we get everything back so that the next person that comes in gets everything that they need, and we've had to sort out other items to purchase and wait for them to get here, which just makes it a lot easier for us.

I guess it all goes back to making our job easier and letting our customers able to let us know what the problem is and we can resolve it as fast as possible, and keep track of all the problems that are going on on a daily basis.

Everything in our system can always use some improvement. Right now I'm working on finding out how duplicate usernames are being created in our ServiceNow instance and that causes problems because we need to assign a ticket to somebody and then it shows two names but they don't know which one to choose so they choose the one that's not active, or it's going to go that person but it's going to go somewhere else, but the other one is the actual one that has the email address and then they get the notifications but the other one doesn't so then they lose the ticket and doesn't know where it is.

I know we've been using it for about three years.

Everything is fine for me.

There are issues sometimes. With the updates, we have a line of code that is probably not compatible with that update so we have to go back and see what line of code needs to be edited so that it works with the new update.

For on-boarding, we pretty much put everything in Active Directory and it just goes over to ServiceNow but we don't like our Human Resources as they don't use ServiceNow. They have their own system so we kind of have to do double the work.

I only joined the company recently, so I don't know if something else was used.

I'm not sure. I wasn't here when they implemented ServiceNow or during the upgrade to Fuji. However, I heard it's pretty easy. The person that did it told me a little bit about it, that she sat down and then just called and was on the phone with ServiceNow. They were going over all the steps and it was maybe a couple of hours and then they did some testing afterwards to make sure that everything was running fine and that's about it.

I would say go for it, because at my other company we had a system called Track-It but nobody ever used it. It wasn't that good, and I don't know if it was cheap or it they just stopped using it altogether, but ServiceNow is really good.

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.

For me it's the development, and in the background it's very easy to manipulate forms, to write simple scripts and to do things. The developer side is very very easy. Because I stress velocity and therefore I can get a lot more work in, because it's so simple, I can maintain my high velocity.

We have 65,000 process users, and it's great. We've used it for ten years or so. We're actually one of the very first adopters of ServiceNow, so we've got a long history with it. The fact that they can do everything that we need to do. For us it's just the amount of stuff that we can put in there and direct people to a single place instead of multiple places.

I always say that I have never been asked to do something in ServiceNow that I couldn't do. They've just released mobile which is an update for the new release, which is a great step in the right direction. The push notification is the way of future, things like system emails and those sort of things are sort of an antiquated way of dealing with the notifications.

I would like to say less of an emphasis on those sort of things and more of emphasis on using ServiceNow as the notifier itself, so as you're logging in, you see the notifications of the things that you need to address then, not to getting spam in your email box. Because what happens invariably, this is the second company that I work for, what people do is they get tired of the ServiceNow emails and they just shove them into a folder and never pay attention to them, and at that point you've completely lost your audience. If there was a better way to get notifications out than email spam, that would be great.

This is my fifth year using it. I'll be entering my sixth in August.

My first instance was a June 2011 instance, and upgrading was a nightmare from that point. It got progressively better. Right now it is flawless, and it takes very little effort to do an upgrade, but getting to that point has been very very difficult. That's probably one of the other things that would be nice for ServiceNow to give us the ability to sort of see all the things that we have changed. Not in the middle of the upgrade, but just ahead of it, so you can try to knock those things out.

We used to have BMC Remedy and we've moved from that. We've consolidated in a single unified place for people to go and do anything IT related that they need to do.

It was easy and straightforward. It's a web-based app essentially, so you get loaded onto a server, and we have twenty-four node cluster in one node. We're on primus and have 65,000 process users going to it. It's relatively easy, as far as getting it up and going and just turning the monitors on and letting people enter.

First, I'd tell you to do it. I've been on four or five separate ITSM systems and ServiceNow has been the best. I've used Remedy, Vantive, and Autotask, and none of them come close to the ease of use and development that ServiceNow has.

I would tell you to step away sort of like as an architecture, because you can do a lot of things on servers now that wind up being dirty data or just technical death. Just be very true, with whatever you're doing, think about it, write it down, then implement it, that sort of thing.

I love it, I love the platform. In fact, I view my job as sort of not trying to put people out of the job. We need to consolidate, we have thousands of tools all over the place, we need to consolidate all those things and I'm very strong at let's consolidate it in ServiceNow, and get rid of all of the sort of money that we are throwing at things.

I'd say auditing, asset tracking, following tickets, and making sure what our employees are doing. The ticketing system though is what we rely on most. I'm able to follow what my co-workers are doing so we're not stepping on each other's toes. This enables us to be as productive as possible.

Compared to HPE Service Manager, ServiceNow offers a lot more customizations and a lot more plug-ins that you can throw in there. I'd just say it has a better ability to customize, and developers can get in and get dirty.

It has a good document repository which translates into a good knowledge base with good articles. Looking at tickets, charts, and the dashboard. Seeing what everyone's working on - it's cool.

To have this external facing site, we can pretty much face talk any customer we need to. They can log into a single portal using single sign on, which means they can use the same account to log into their machines and our environment. Sending tickets to a central location. Being able to track those tickets to see where their requests and incidents are in the process.

Just ease of use for people who aren't very technically savvy. Sometimes it does take a lot of customization to make it easier for the user to use but for someone who's technical, it's pretty straightforward.

I actually worked with a smaller team with Optum that does POCs and we've actually been proving out ServiceNow for about four years. Now they are up the street we call it, the greater organisation is implementing the same thing using HPE Service Manager. I think their goal live date is July this year.

They're always very functional about updates and patching.

The fact that it's tied directly into LDAP means that it's great. I don't think there's a limit.

It depends how deep you want to go. You can use it for pretty much for anything. I wasn't involved in the implementation of it, but from a management perspective, it's pretty sweet.

I would say that it's just very straightforward. You want your users to have a good experience. With ease of use, I'd say it's perfect.

The flexibility - we've been able to change it and make it look like our brand, so we have our brand logo on it, etc. We've been able to accommodate a lot of our old customization than we had done in our previous system, we've been able to roll that in, that's some of the niceties with the platform. I think that's one of the biggest advantages for us, is the flexibility to be able to do the dashboards and try to get people more involved in the application rather than running a report.

It allows us to offer a different variety of toolsets for our staff, which our last system was not very flexible in that regard. Allowing my customers to go in and do their own dashboards, write their own reports, change the color of their screens has made them feel more involved and more engaged in the tool. We're seeing more requests for newer things and different things. People are thinking outside the box instead of just thinking inside of it.

As far as the hospital industry, we have not really rolled it out or it's not as big a feature to our external customers right now (the clinicians in the hospital). What we're looking to do though is to provide our outside customers the ability to do more things through the service catalog and have one central location for doing things. We have different systems that do different things, so we can bring them and ServiceNow's platform will allow us to bring all of those items into one spot, so it's a one stop shop. That's what we're looking to do, that's what is best for the hospital.

The training, and that's not the tools, I'm very happy with the tools, it's just I have not been able to get my arms wrapped around it, to be able to do all the multiple things that I want to do. We're still learning it. I was telling someone the other day "I feel like I'm a developer," but then again I'm not really a developer, because I just need that one or two more advanced courses to push me off the edge so that I can get in and do all these great things that people are talking about doing. I just haven't seen that piece.

We did have some performance issues where some of the system areas were slow, but that was really our fault. It was a blip in the lifecycle. I mean comparatively we don't have any downtimes, we've got a hundred percent availability, so we're very happy in that regard. I'm also very happy with their support, they're very engaging and they've been very helpful when we have had problems.

There was a home grown solution as well as an external solution. We had had that solution for over twenty years and it had been through many different partners and many different hands, and it was not very customizable. I think that especially with ServiceNow, it's allowed us to start pushing forward the thought of ITIL within our authority.

That was Service Desk Express. We actually had it when it was Magic Solutions back in 1997, out of Newark, New Jersey. It actually was the lighter version of, it was the smaller offering from BMC.

Ours was very complex. We had several issues because we were not in ITIL shop, and because we were not only changing our tool but really changing the culture of the way we had done things in the past, there was a lot of push back. Having them come in and having ServiceNow's help was good since they did a great job. It wasn't easy, it was kind of a struggle. We did have some issues where we kind of hoped that the vendor that we had brought in to help us with the implementation would tell us what industry standards or best practices were. We didn't see it, we were missing some of those pieces. That made it kind of hard. We also had an executive turnover in the middle of it, so that doesn't help.That hindered our implementation. 

My suggestion to people would be to come and learn about the tool and learn about everything it can do before you make any decisions and before you start your implementation, because if I had to do my implementation over again I would change what I was trying to do. Like we implemented three pieces, or one piece, that really wasn't very helpful and I would have rather have tried something different.

I'd do it. I mean just do it. If you're looking for a flexible tool that's going to grow with you, that's going to expand your flexibility, or expand your team, or expand how you do things and streamline things, I would do it. We've only been on it three years, but we've already done one upgrade, and I was prepared for the worst. I had come into work at midnight, and brought my snacks and sat at the desk and then basically watched the upgrade, and I won't be doing that again. I mean it's just that easy, it really is.

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.

Because I do IT planning and program management, the project portfolio management part is most helpful and useful, but I can also see the integration to other parts of the IT operation as well. I think that's most useful because we are looking from an end-to-end perspective within the IT organization, though we may have different functional teams, but we are working as one team, so it's important that the various operations or processes are tied and integrated into one platform, in one end-to-end process.

I can see a very good product strategy. We see enhancements or enhanced features in each of the releases. I see the roadmap is good and the technology underneath is also good.

During the Knowledge16 conference, I found out more about the IT financial management part, which is important to me because we're trying to do more finance on our IT operations so that we can measure performance. We can also share info with our business shareholders and stakeholders as well. I see those features as really useful when we transform our IT organization into a service organization.

In our region we don't have many choices of implementation partners. At the same time, I don't see that they are as proficient as they are in other regions.

Today we aren't seeing major issues but one of our concern is that it's expensive.

Not at this company, but beforehand I had used Remedy. It is a very traditional IT Service Management tool, basically a help desk, but I think there's a lot more in ServiceNow.

The underlying technology and also the application or customization facility, or the technology behind ServiceNow actually is quite robust and quite agile, which we can make use of to do a release and deliver it quickly.

We're using Deloitte as our implementation partner. They are doing a fantastic job, but they're just one particular resource, one or two that can help us, but in our region, we don't have many choices on partners that are proficient in ServiceNow as well as in IT operations.

We are trying to do it in a phased approach, we want to have the initial system for us, and then we'll use it and improve-enhance it later on. I don't see that we'll have major issues, because our goal is not to have it all in one step, but rather we are evolving our solution.

I do not have particular details, but what I heard from my boss is that it's not a cheap solution, especially when you want to roll out to more people or more colleagues in an organization. That is really a significant factor we're considering because in terms of the cost it's not cheap, so we hesitate. We can see a lot of scalability and expansion possibility in rolling out beyond the IT organization.