Harness the underlying platform and anchor yourself to a philosophy, because everything else can be changed
Updated October 03, 2016
Harness the underlying platform and anchor yourself to a philosophy, because everything else can be changed
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ServiceNow
We are using ServiceNow mainly for IT processes (ITIL): Incident, Problem, Change, Service Catalog (Requests), Project Portfolio, etc. With our CreateNow license, we have slowly been creating break-fix or request-fulfillment tickets for other operationally focused groups such as Pipeline Services, Owner Relations, and others who were previously using shared mailboxes to do this work. They have seen the value of standardizing the types of work they do and are enjoying the historical metrics and clear technician performance.
Pros
- Any type of work that keeps occurring and can easily be compared across "technicians", or the people fixing/fulfilling/completing the ticket, and across timeframes.
- Once all those "chunks" of work are in the lowest common denominator of activity, it's a direct analog of performance in your organization and can be used to report valuable data.
- Having those activities be very repeatable is the first step in automating them and removing them from your human workload - so they can be freed up to work on more difficult or creative tasks.
Cons
- Haven't tried the new Project creation tool in Geneva yet, but Projects are always tricky when the tasks associated with them have dependencies on the order of completion and amount of work involved with each. To get each task down to a chunk of 3-4 hours would be a lot of work and hundreds of task dependencies.
- It's very expensive if only used as a service desk ticketing system instead of an entire task management platform across the business. ServiceNow Express or other competitors would be much cheaper if only looking for IT service management.
- Talent to heavily configure or add new functionality (developers) are costly, but you can mitigate this cost by training someone internal who has Javascript or similar object-oriented programming experience.
- Hard to put a dollar amount on ambiguous efficiency gains in service (not operations) departments, but even after >20% company-wide layoffs with the oil price downturn, we were able to keep our high level of service.
- We have just started a pilot program integrating Microsoft SCCM with the Service Catalog so people may request software installations based on Active Directory group memberships. Its adoption and manpower savings will be how we gauge other automation projects going forward.
- Competitive labor market for experienced ServiceNow developers makes it difficult to find/retain talent, but there are many third-party implementation and outsourcing firms filling the gaps for any short-term projects you may need. Managed Service Providers are another possibility for the long-term.
- BMC Track-It! and BMC FootPrints Service Core
When we reviewed BMC offerings and compared with ServiceNow in late 2012, ServiceNow had the most flexibility and I believe still has the most flexibility if you're comfortable with the underlying platform and have a strong guiding service philosophy. You can make the tool do anything, but the real questions are "Why?" and "What are you getting from doing it that way?" Most ITSM tools are just tools, whereas ServiceNow is a tool that was used to make itself. It is a platform/environment for cloud publishing and they happened to make an ITIL ITSM app on it at first because that's what Fred Luddy knew best, then had faith that IT departments around the world would have the talent to make more meaningful, greater things with it.
ServiceNow IT Service Management Feature Ratings
Using ServiceNow
100 - Mainly Information Technology, Facilities, some Human Resources/HRIS, and a few operational business Project Management teams. More than half are in Helpdesk Support, Infrastructure Systems Administration, Networking, SCADA, SAP development, Business Applications, and IT PMO. About a quarter are in Facilities, and the remaining quarter are the custom app ticketing solution to replace shared mailboxes.
1 - Process-oriented, ITIL best practices, familiar with Java/Javascript or other object-oriented programming, good with logical workflows, etc.
Using ServiceNow
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Well integrated Quick to learn Feel confident using | Unnecessarily complex Requires technical support Inconsistent Lots to learn |
- Very powerful underlying platform
- Most customizations are drag-and-drop
- More advanced tweaking (and complete new app creation) possible with only rudimentary programming knowledge (Javascript that calls custom libraries/methods with ability to create your own)
- Was designed as a tool that creates itself, so almost anything ServiceNow (the company) can create or make, so can you
- Took a lot of ITIL foundations understanding and administration training to utilize its full potential
- Inconsistent input parameters and return values in some of the callable methods.
- Outdated Wiki; even hard to find solutions through the Community Portal/Forum
Yes - Works well if you are brand new to the platform, but if your implementation was prior to some of the mobile functions, there's a lot of customization to be done to get it to be as useful as the desktop version. New iOS app allows notifications and Apple Watch notifications, but is redundant if you already have email notifications setup (might be good to clear up email inbox though)
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