Independent Review of ServiceNow [Overview, Pros, and Cons]

servicenow is one of the hottest up-and-coming enterprise technologies in the marketplace but what is servicenow and is it the right fit for you as an organization that's what i'm going to talk about here today my name is eric kimberling i'm the ceo of third stage consulting we're an independent consulting firm that helps clients throughout the world to reach their third stages of digital transformation success and servicenow is one of the hottest technology companies in the enterprise space you may know them because the former ceo of sap is now the ceo of servicenow and he's the

guy if you don't recall he's a guy that wears the sunglasses all the time and hangs out with bono and other celebrities but that's maybe the way you know a service now but servicenow is actually a very viable enterprise technology and it's a really interesting one too because it fills a really narrow niche and a very unique need and unmet demand in the marketplace and for some organization servicenow can be a great fit for others it may not be the right fit for what you're looking for so what i want to do today is talk

a little bit first about what is servicenow and then i'll talk about the pros and cons of the solution as well and before i get to that though it's important to note that we are not affiliated with servicenow neither my company third stage nor myself are affiliated we receive no commission from the vendor we have no affiliation with servicenow or any other software vendor for that matter so this is meant to be a very independent objective review of servicenow [Music] so first it helps understand what exactly servicenow is and this may help you decide whether

or not it's worth considering servicenow is not your typical or traditional enterprise technology in that it doesn't fit neatly into a box it doesn't fit into the erp category it doesn't fit into crm certainly doesn't fit into hcm or business intelligence or any of those but it does have bits and pieces of all those different types of technologies and for some types of organizations it can fit a very important need and niche within the organizations so the best way to think about servicenow is that it is a platform and it's a workflow tool so unlike

erp systems and other back office sorts of systems that are focused on consolidating data and capturing data and providing reports and that sort of thing this is more of a customer and employee facing technology that's meant to automate the workflows as it relates to customers and employees so some examples of where servicenow is commonly used would be for example for it help desks you can use it as a ticketing system where if a internal customer contacts you and says they have a problem or they need something fixed you can track that ticket and it goes

through a series of workflows within servicenow you can also use it to track customer complaints or customer inquiries so if you have a high volume contact center or a customer service center servicenow is oftentimes used in those scenarios it can also be used to track workflows with employees so if you have a new hire that needs to go through an onboarding process or if you have an employee who needs to request approval for the acquisition of certain assets or other procurement needs servicenow can be used to track some of those workflows and the approval processes

that go along with that so you can see just from that general description that it's not a financial system it's not an inventory management system it's not a crm or a sales system it's not a business intelligence tool but it does bits and pieces of all that stuff as well as the core workflows that it handles now some of the industries where servicenow is most commonly used would be industries like telco energy and utilities where there's a high volume of customers that are interacting with the company every day or with a customer service center i.t

departments or organizations that have large it departments are more likely to use servicenow certainly software development and tech companies are likely to use it because it allows them to track some of the workflows associated with software development and it's also used quite a bit in government and education as well [Music] so some of the functional strengths of servicenow include a number of things first of all it's easy to use a lot of what we found with clients that use it is that the ease of use the ease of configuring and setting up different sorts of

workflows is relatively easy especially when you compare it to some of the modern sas or cloud-based erp systems that are a bit more rigid servicenow actually gives you a lot of flexibility in how you establish those workflows that some erp systems can't handle well it also allows you to set up process flows and process alerts and assign those process flows to different people so you can really track the process not just the workflow itself but who's responsible for the next step in the process it creates the alerts that go along with that really automates and

streamlines some of those processes that organizations need especially when dealing with high volume environments such as customer contacts or customer complaints it also has visual task boards that represent or look like kanban sorts of boards so if you're in a manufacturing environment or if you're trained in kanban sorts of concepts servicenow provides that capability and then another really cool thing about servicenow that most erp and enterprise technologies don't have is a process mining capability even though it's not a process mining tool it has a lot of capabilities that oftentimes require a separate process mining tool

and what process mining does is that it visualizes and tracks how processes are actually working within the system where the bottlenecks are what the volumes are what the variations and exceptions to that process are and it really gives you good visibility into how your processes are actually working so this can be extremely effective in terms of really optimizing your business processes making sure you're as efficient as possible removing the bottlenecks and being as effective as possible now for more information about process mining and what that is i've actually included a link to a video that

talks about what is process mining and that'll give you a little bit more insight into what that tool is but that's just one of many capabilities that servicenow provides and one of the many strengths that it provides its customers [Music] now as far as weaknesses there's a few on the functional side first and foremost it's not an erp system so as i mentioned before it's not going to provide accounting and gl capabilities it's not going to be a full-blown inventory management warehouse management or supply chain or manufacturing sort of management tool it's meant to track

general processes and workflows and generally you're going to need to tie servicenow into other products or other systems to create a complete solution for your entire organization that may not be a deal breaker for you but it does require a certain amount of technical sophistication to be able to manage that integration now having said that and i'll get to this a little bit later but it is more of a platform that's meant to be integrated with other tools so it is a bit easier than other solutions in the marketplace to integrate with third-party tools but

it is something to be aware of in addition one of the other weaknesses from a functional perspective is that some of the business intelligence and reporting capabilities are less desirable than some of the other systems in the market so in terms of getting good graphs and good visuals as to what's happening in the system that can be a bit challenging in some cases and then finally setting up some of these business processes and workflows even though they're very flexible and it provides a lot of different options it can be a bit complex so for some

organizations it's overkill or it's a lot of complexity that it introduces to the organization so you really have to think about do you have the right internal i.t capabilities to manage this sort of solution and if not maybe there's other solutions in the marketplace that are better fits for you so some of the technical strengths of servicenow include the fact that as i mentioned before it is a platform it's meant to tie to and integrate with other systems so even though it has its core competencies its core workflow management and the customer experience type of

capabilities it provides it also recognizes in many ways that it isn't trying to be everything to everyone and it's not going to provide you a complete enterprise-wide solution meaning that you're probably going to have to tie it back to your erp system maybe your human capital management system maybe even your procurement system there's other systems you'll want to tie this system to so that's one of the strengths is that it is designed and the architecture is built to integrate with other third-party systems and in addition another advantage from a technical perspective is that it's highly

customizable so it's one of the more flexible products in the workplace in fact it at one point was in our top 10 enterprise-wide erp systems even though it's not an erp system it did make our top 10 i believe in 2021 because it is such a flexible system it provides a lot of customization options that other erp systems don't have so that's something to keep in mind as well as it is very flexible it's focused on creating workflows that fit your organization and so if workflows especially in a high volume setting is important to you

then from a technical perspective servicenow can be a great fit [Music] so some of the technical weaknesses of the product include the fact that many have found that from a technical perspective it's complex to set up and to configure it takes time to do it's not as easy to set up as some of the other systems in the marketplace which in some ways is to be expected because it can do so much and because it's so flexible that translates to a certain amount of complexity that some may not be comfortable with in addition as the

software is frequently being updated we found through our customer base that there's oftentimes down times and disruptions when there's new patches or new capabilities introduced to the system so that creates difficulty for organizations oftentimes and disruptions to their use of the product when there's upgrades to the solution and finally we found that some of the performance at times can be slow with servicenow when you compare to other systems i don't know how much of that has to do with the software itself versus the infrastructure of the organizations that are trying to use it but that

seems to be something we see more often with servicenow than other systems in the marketplace so i hope this has given you a balanced view of some of the pros and cons of servicenow and for more information about this product as well as other enterprise technologies both similar to servicenow as well as other types of technologies like erp systems and human capital management supply chain financial systems etc i encourage you to download our annual digital transformation report which includes a number of independent reviews and rankings like this one and it'll help you navigate and understand

some of the pros and cons of the different technologies available to you in the marketplace so i encourage you to download that included a link below so you can access that off of our website i've also included a number of links to other resources that are meant to help you through your digital transformation journey so i encourage you to check that out below so i hope you found this information useful and hope you have a great day