ServiceNow

Avantages

Highly scalable and provides modular solutions for implementing service based best practices across the enterprise. Initially focused on ITIL it has expanded to include ITOM, ITSM, and ITBM functions. Out of the box solutions for other areas of the enterprise including HR, Security, Governance, Finance, and CSR. The platform itself allows development using standard web technologies and programming skills and they offer a vast documentation library and vibrant community of developers and users. Their support is top notch and they are always quick to respond.

Inconvénients

Their pricing model is complex and unwieldy. It can be very hard to determine which features you actually have access to. Some of the features which seem like they should be part of the base product functionality are split into sub-modules at additional cost. This can give the impression that you are being nickeled and dimed for every little feature. Inquiring about instance capabilities of technical staff is always referred to your sales rep.

Early adopters who did a lot of customization can find themselves in a lot technical debt prior to ServiceNow’s current guidance of best practices. Some of the earlier product design decisions have sometimes forced compromises to be implemented for product growth. This can create some ambiguous methods non-intuitive workarounds to be employed in development. Their documentation can be somewhat sparse on examples or use cases for particular API or feature specific applications.

Finally, since the product can become the core of so many areas of the enterprise, it can require quite a large investment in support resources and it requires these resources to understand SaaS management differences vs traditional application support development.

Avantages

ITIL based
Service Portal (Self Service Portal for quick searches spanning instance or specific areas)
Knowledge Base (despite that not being checked in the available features)
Full Service Management solution for the ENTIRE organization
Strong Workflow engine
Visible Table structures for clean data flows
Extremely customizable (Forms, Fields, Tables, Applications, Portal, Workflow, Knowledge Base, etc...)
Best in the business system architecture (fully redundant instances)
HI Administration portal and ServiceNow support are top notch
Service Now community is extremely active
Docs site (formerly wiki) well updated and complete.
Great organization and User groups
You get a cake upon launch!
Extensive Integration capabilities

Inconvénients

Cost
Some out-of-box examples really don't match up to any organizations needs and leave you wanting more
Email rules are more complex than they need to be (some of this can be mitigated by free add-ons like Postmaster)
Configuration can sometimes be limited and requires some Javascript to get past basics
Mid Servers for integrations can be more work to maintain than desired

Avantages

As customizable as you need. Our Supply Chain Contact Center uses ServiceNow as their ticketing system. They're able to capture the source of the ticket (email vs phone), responsible parties, root cause, category and sub-category of issue, comments, and more. It's phenomenal. They've begun to use it to assign tasks from their department to other departments. This is a huge boost to their reporting capabilities, as they can now get a truer picture of their ability to hit SLAs. Our Process Optimization team is ramping up to use this to track reporting and project requests. Another stellar feature is ServiceNow's document repository. We're able to store training or case documents within ServiceNow, and then, when a rep types in their comments, ServiceNow actually displays related training and case documentation at the bottom of the page so the rep can review related documentation and resolve their tickets more quickly.

Inconvénients

While ServiceNow has been wonderful for our Supply Chain Contact Center, it hasn't worked as well for our Security team, but I believe this has to do with how they've customized it for their own uses. For instance, my department will open a ticket for a new hire to receive proper system access, and we put the new hire's start date in the original ticket. Well, the original ticket isn't what's actually assigned to the Security Analyst - a sub-task is assigned, and the new hire's start date doesn't copy down to that sub-task. Consequently, Security Analysts often have to reach out to us to get information we already put in the ticket. Again, I think this has to do with how the system has been customized for their use.

Avantages

All users work in the same interface, creating a pretty seamless pipeline between end users and departments that identify a need and the department and content manager responsible for the requestors need. ServiceNow handles most of the administrative duties, documentation, and organization for tasks/projects from step-by-step request submission, to manager approval, to task creation and delivery, ensuring timely communication and adherence to procedure, while freeing up development time.

Inconvénients

Although the User Interface is straightforward for most tasks and consistent among all users, there are many rudimentary features that are either buggy or absent. For example, when a task is submitted, both a "request" and a "task" are assigned. They are identical and both must be filled out to close the job, but they do not interact with each other and one can be closed and the other open in the system. Similarly, there are no steps between completing and closing a task, but submitting a task as complete does nothing but refresh the page and change the "complete" option to "close." It doesn't not even populate the completion time.

Avantages

ServiceNow is a Service Management Platform, ranked by Gartner just as the #1 in the global market of digital service management platforms. Easy to use, deep dive, almost boundaryless ServiceNow software integrates a strong and robust collaborative service management engine, that allows almost all kind of organizations, no matter the economic sector, to optimize and automate any business and IT service through a full function collaborative tool set, such as Asset Discovery, service catalog, business rules definition, SLA's and analytics easy-to-build dashboards, not to mention the application development capabilities which stands as the ServiceNow main differentiators.

Inconvénients

As any technology solutions, there is and will be room for improvement, starting with more built-in integration capabilities in order to simplify more complex implementations.