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ServiceNow: At A Glance

Recently I’ve started a Desktop Support Analyst position at UCLA Health, and there’s a really interesting ticketing system being used. At first, it was quite foreign to me, especially since it’s my first IT position, but after a few months of usage it’s become my life! After doing a bit of research, and working with the product on a daily basis, I’ll be covering all things ServiceNow.

ServiceNow, from what I can deduce, is a cloud-centric company that provides software for technical management support. ServiceNow specializes in IT operations management (ITOM), service management (ITSM), and business management (ITBM). It allows users to manage customer interactions, teams, and projects through a variety of plugins.

ServiceNow essentially provides companies and corporations, a product that provides better consolidation, consumerization, and automation for ITSM and all areas related.

Product Features

ServiceNow offers a service model centered on what can help users, ie. me, identify the root cause of issues, and fix said issues. The service model appears on the interface as tasks and activities, separated by cloud services. Together, it’s part of a very comprhensive “managed workflow” that also supports pretty nifty features like real-time collaboration, specifically communication and resource sharing. Since the product’s services and processes can be changed, the product can be used in multiple industries like Financial Services, Government, Manufacturing, Telecommunications, Education, and Healthcare.

ServiceNow’s flexibility is definitely it’s strongest suite. Because of that, it can be used to support most workflows. Common uses:

• large scale ticketing system
• project benchmarking tool

ServiceNow Example

The image above is an example of ServiceNow ITSM Homepage. The page continues further down with more options and analytics. But as you can see there is alot of data being display. Global tickets, that can be seen by all IT Staff, Incident Reports, where tickets are created, etc. All these these widgets, and simple menu navigation, it makes data entry much faster. There are specialized groups of users with different policies, seemless connection with work email, live feeds of events, and many more.

I’d create an “How to…” but many of my tasks are simply a GUI button click away. Which goes to show ServiceNow’s specialization efforts in streamlining the Desktop Support workflow.

Stay tuned for next week’s blog!