ServiceNow - which problems can't you solve with it?
December 28, 2018
ServiceNow - which problems can't you solve with it?
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ServiceNow
ServiceNow is currently gaining market share, here at Wayfair. It was on-boarded to the company in early 2018 due to our Monitoring / Critical Response teams need for a robust reporting platform with available integrations to our monitoring tools (Data Dog/Logic Monitor).
Since then, we have seen team after team approach the ServiceNow Engineering group at Wayfair to onboard their ticketing needs.
I say ticketing, and not "Incident, Change, or Request needs", as ServiceNow is providing our team with the conduit to help all Wayfair employees understand how to organize themselves in a more ITIL based approach, where it makes sense. We haven't adopted a full ITIL approach, but the segmentation within ServiceNow allows the Wayfair ServiceNow team to coach its users to understand the importance of labeling, organization and building automation with a platform or layered (not app/tool/single use case based) approach.
Since then, our Monitoring, DC Operations, Infra Ops, and Help Desk organizations have partnered to build solutions in ServiceNow.
Business Problems addressed:
- Change, Incident, Request, Problem, Assets, CMDB: We are using these modules, out of box, to solve everyday operational needs
- Alert >> Monitoring: Infrastructure teams are storing and reporting on alerts, and creating custom INC records based on event mgmt logic (custom)
- General Use: digitizing process, decommissioning other internal apps
Since then, we have seen team after team approach the ServiceNow Engineering group at Wayfair to onboard their ticketing needs.
I say ticketing, and not "Incident, Change, or Request needs", as ServiceNow is providing our team with the conduit to help all Wayfair employees understand how to organize themselves in a more ITIL based approach, where it makes sense. We haven't adopted a full ITIL approach, but the segmentation within ServiceNow allows the Wayfair ServiceNow team to coach its users to understand the importance of labeling, organization and building automation with a platform or layered (not app/tool/single use case based) approach.
Since then, our Monitoring, DC Operations, Infra Ops, and Help Desk organizations have partnered to build solutions in ServiceNow.
Business Problems addressed:
- Change, Incident, Request, Problem, Assets, CMDB: We are using these modules, out of box, to solve everyday operational needs
- Alert >> Monitoring: Infrastructure teams are storing and reporting on alerts, and creating custom INC records based on event mgmt logic (custom)
- General Use: digitizing process, decommissioning other internal apps
- Request Management - ServiceNow's front end facing catalog is a fantastic cost-wise approach to expose the repetitive request-able functions your organization can offer to your company. Cost/Chargeback functions can be included effortlessly. Baking in Knowledge throughout the catalog like experience (to promote self service) is effortless. If you can organize your team into repeatable processes, then ServiceNow can take everyone out of email and spreadsheets, and into a fully transparent, documented, automated workflow to deliver each and every step of that process.
- Alerting / Monitoring - ServiceNow provides the tables/functionality you would need to store, organize and report on all monitoring tools in your portfolio. Importing information into ServiceNow is decidedly easy. Enriching data within ServiceNow is straightforward and benefits from all other business / infrastructure related content that you store on the platform. Using Discovery alongside monitoring tools provides the capabilities and flexibility needed to protect and run daily operations needed to support a growing and thriving company that Wayfair is.
- CMDB / Discovery - Very easy, licensing the technology that comes with Discovery is the single easier decision you can make to provide the level of support, transparency and consistency your infrastructure teams require to stay ahead of issues...and act quickly when they are happening.
- Backend Support - If you size dictates it, purchase the technical support from ServiceNow. They react quickly and with a solution your team can actually use to solve both short and long-term roadblocks.
- Pricing - we all want to expose as much as our data as we can, internally. Easy reporting makes happy employees, and happy employee's stay productive. ServiceNow allows you to expose a front-end catalog like experience to all users in your company...but restricts their intuitive and fantastic back-end reporting capabilities to a subset of paid (sometimes expensive) users. The trick is finding our where you can and cannot compromise on functionality and experience. Sometimes you need to buy a license for a team, sometimes you can provide on-demand reporting functionality. Really depends case by case.
- Widget Flexibility - Allowing non-dev users to build their own widgets. Make the tool more friendly (no-code) to non-development/front-end only users. I would love to support a widget or piece of functionality which allows users to customize their ServiceNow catalog experience or reporting without my team's involvement.
- Better back-end reporting - reporting on system tables or core data is not always accessible via ServiceNow reporting/logging. I have often found myself at a roadblock to report on simple statistics like page views or number of clicks. We want to understand how our users are engaging in the platform, but there is a lack of reportable tables/metadata to help us build this picture.
- Alert >> Monitoring response team - Servicenow has provided our monitoring teams with the ability to quickly set up automation, notifications, and response management off importing data, aggregating it, and using it for queries both on / off the platform. Our ability to identify the specific alerts to focus on has increased in efficiency
- Incident Coordinator / Critical Response team - has built many notifications, messaging, and response layers of automation to provide them with a simple form that allows them to create historical data to describe alerts/incidents, measure and compare issues, find and resolve the issues, then communicate out to various pockets of people. Their team's reach and capability to contact different segments of people (consistently and accurately) has been a direct result of their use of ServiceNow. Even better, everything is controlled from fewer interfaces, making their reach..greater, but their process...simpler.
- Help Desk team - utilizes the bevy of information we can aggregate in ServiceNow, to solve every problem we have here at Wayfair. Whether its a customer issue or a password reset, our Help Desk is enabled to research, read/listen, communicate, and work to resolve each and every issue that plagues us. This team is our biggest supporter of ServiceNow, and is actively at the forefront of new automation in each and every one of our sprints. Wayfair is growing rapidly, and in order to support this growth (without massive complementary hiring) we look to ServiceNow to provide them that exponential capacity.
In my opinion, ServiceNow has no competitors in the space it operates. It is best in class, and it really is just a decision on a specific module of ServiceNow against what ever other tool you are comparing against it. As a whole, the out of box ITIL package is best in breed.